Today, June 15, the reduced early registration fee ends! (300€ including social events)
From June 16 the price will be 360€.

In order to get the discounted fee, register online today!
The 4. International Conference on Electronic Voting will be held from July 21 to 24 of 2010 in Bregenz, Austria. Please have a look at our internationally casted conference programme here.

We are looking forward to seeing you at the conference in July – so register now!

Daniel Botz – EVOTE2010 Conference Manager

The implementation of e-voting for the elections to the Austrian Federation of students was one of the most sophisticated e-government projects in 2009. It’s aim was to complement the paper based voting with an electronic voting channel. Together with the implementation of e-voting the legal basis was adapted to include an electronic election administration.

This first of a kind implementation of e-voting in Austria was technically successful. Almost 1% (2.161) of the eligible students cast their votes electronically between 18th and 22nd of May 2009. For identification and authentication, they used the citizen card (the Austrian model of a smart card with digital signature) and a suitable smartcard-reader device, which was handed out for free. The anonymity was performed by using a cryptographic protocol in the post-electoral phase, similar to a paper based postal voting procedure. The e-voting servers were placed in two data centers of the Federal Computing Centre to allow for fail-safe operation.

The use of the citizen card was appropriate because of its associated high safety and powerful legal standing. However the penetration of the citizen card is rather low at present. Therefore, the federal ministry of science and research started the initiative studi.gv.at with the purpose to raise awareness and penetration of the citizen card amongst students. While over 14.000 students made use of this opportunity, only a small portion of them used e-voting. Main reason to this is the general limited number of applications aimed at students which make use of this card. The general acceptance and with it the penetration numbers for this smart card will only be reached when a wide range and a large number of additional services are provided with appropriate functionality, especially for students.

The discussion around e-voting was rather controversial with clear pro and contra positions. On the one side the federal ministry of science and research and on the other side selected representatives of the federation of students. The discussion dominated the electoral campaigns and hurt the institution of the elections.

For future uses of e-voting in Austria the penetration of identification and authentication means has to be raised as well as a more positive atmosphere amongst the stakeholders has to be reached.

by E-Voting.CC

We are looking forward to another highly international and very interesting event!

Daniel Botz – E-Voting.CC

Please find further information, templates and the call for papers here.

I hope this helps to finish your papers in time!

Daniel Botz, E-Voting.CC

This year’s proceedings contain the seventeen papers selected for the presentation at the conference out of more than forty submissions. To assure scientific quality, the selection was based on a strict and anonymous review process. The papers cover the following subjects: e-voting experiences, social, legal, political, democratic and security issues of e-voting, as well as solutions on how to (re)design election workflows, and finally how to implement and observe electronic voting systems.

You can order the proceedings in print for EUR 19,70 (+shipping & handling) by sending an e-mail to office@e-voting.cc.

For citation and download purposes please use:
Krimmer, R., Grimm, R. (Eds.): Electronic Voting 2008, GI Lecture Notes in Informatics, P-131, Bonn, 2008.

Daniel Botz, E-Voting.CC

For the fourth time since 2004 our exclusive conference with hundred key experts and deciders from all five continents will be held from the 21th until the 24th of July 2010. The venue will be, as in previous years, the beautiful Castle Hofen, which is situated in Lochau in the vicinity of Bregenz and Lake Constance.

The conference will focus on all aspects of electronic voting, such as legal, technical, social, political questions as well as reports on implementations and practical experiences throughout Europe and the world. There will also be workshops on different topics held by designated experts in the field. The regular Conference Fee will be 300EUR (incl. VAT). The event is limited to 110 visitors only.

Social activities such as the legendary dinner event “Käsestraße” or a visit of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera “Aida” at the floating stage in Bregenz are the highlights after the work has been done. We will also host a Pep-Net meeting in the fore field of the conference.

The time line for submission of the papers is as follows:

Submission of the full paper: February, 12th 2010
Review deadline: March, 12th 2010
Notification of acceptance: April, 5th 2010
Receipt of the final paper: May, 14th 2010

If you are interested in submitting you paper or in attending the conference, send us an email with your inquiry to: 2010 [at] e-voting.cc.

by Daniel Botz – E-Voting.CC

The E-Voting system required the students to authenticate themselves using a citizen card. In Austria this “citizen card function” is included in the social security card, which is called e-card. The e-card was launched in March 2005 in order to modernize the old fashioned system of legitimizing the citizen’s status in front of doctors via the paper version of the “Krankenschein”.

The e-card has since then been issued 8.5 million times according to the official website. 11.151 partners accept the e-card in doctor’s practices all over Austria and it has been used 405 million times for this purpose. But the e-card is much more than a tool for more efficient social security administration. It can be activated and hence provide citizen card function for its holder. The benefit of this is to ensure secure web access to online banking, to file one’s income tax statement online, to request a character reference and many more. You could buy a car using the activated e-card, a card reader and your PINs.

Although this system itself is quite well established, security is granted and the usability is good, the citizen card function wasn’t as distributed and commonly used as it could have been. One of the main reasons for this is, that the real killer application is still missing. The second reason could be the absence of proactive campaigns to distribute the cards and the necessary card reader and to communicate this benefit to the citizens.

In the fore field of the mentioned E-Voting project, a campaign, named studi.gv.at, has been started. It was aiming at building up some of the necessary infrastructure. Especially the second objection of lacking campaigns has now been debilitated. The studi.gv.at-campaign really arose awareness for E-Voting and the citizen card amongst the Austrian students. More than 11.500 citizen cards and free card readers have been distributed (before this campaign only about 15.000 citizen cards on the new version of the e-card have been activated throughout Austria).

How was this achieved?

The concept was simple but effective. The campaign focused on active students to ensure word of mouth to colleagues. For this reason countless info stands were arranged in the universities’ assemblies, the dates were printed on large posters. Student union functionaries were used as multipliers. The appearance focused on the time-saving aspect, social participation and being an early adopter. Scientific expertise has been provided to communicate credibility and trustworthiness. Another key strategy was to use the network of the involved players to further encourage the campaign. 30 Tutors were selected and trained with the ability to educate students so they could activate citizen cards by themselves for friends, colleagues or family members.

Communication for studi.gv.at was facilitated by the website, a regular newsletter, banners on partner websites and press releases at predefined milestone events. A raffle was also organized giving away trendy i-pods to the lucky winners. Forum threads and “advertorials” on universities’ media rounded the concept.

Another lesson learned is the fact, that the numbers of activated e-cards were steadily increasing, but only by relatively and equally small amounts for the first five months of the campaign. From October 2008 until February 2009 “only” 4.800 citicen cards were activated. The rest of the 6.700 cards have been activated in the last three moonths, which is astonishing!
This was achieved by various factors. First of all by the tremendous effort of the engaged promotion partners, which would elsehow wouldn’t have been possible. Second by the medial awareness created and gained by the emotional discussion around E-Voting in Austria. And thirdly by the fact, that such campaigns seem to need some time to build up momentum. People take a while until they get interested, until they care for something new. Getting attention is hard in the beginning, but if you dive through the hard time, it really pays.

All in all the studi.gv.at campaign is a real success story almost doubling the number activated citizen cards in Austria within months with manageable cost and reasonable effort. It truly boosted Austria’s “e-Governability”.

by Daniel Botz – E-Voting.CC

The organization has now again, as in previous years, made an effort to research its members’ needs. From the beginning of March until April 20th an anonymous online survey has been conducted to find a better understanding for these needs and to communicate them to the Austrian Foreign Ministry.

The Austrian Federal Computing Centre (BRZ) was in charge of designing, setting up and implementing the online platform. The survey consisted of ten themes related to which e-Government and e-Participation services expats want from Austria. Three of them were to be picked as a choice, an own suggestion could also be added. The answers were weighted, points were given according to the relative importance. The themes were:

• Citizenship related issues
• Employment Services
• Education in Austria, specially for youth
• Institutionalized representation of expatriates in the Austrian parliament
• General information about Austria
• Heritage related questions
• Participation in elections
• Pension related questions
• Returning to Austria
• Social- and insurance related questions

2.779 citizens have participated, 350 have added own suggestions and 1.245 have requested to keep informed via email about further polls.

The outcome was quite clear:

Citizenship related issues was the most important topic with 3.002 points, closely followed by
Pension related questions with 2.961 points and on the astonishing 3rd place is the need for
participation in national elections with 2.538 points. This third issue is in particular interesting as it shows, that expats are interested on politics in their home country and they wish to actively participate, which seems to contrast the situation created by poor voter turnout in Austrian elections. Since the introduction of postal voting in 2007 this is already a possibility.

The following three priorities were quite a bit behind the first. Returning to Austria with 1.632, Social- and insurance related questions with 1.619 and General information about Austria with 1.552 points.

Finally there was a cluster of the trailing four issues Heritage related questions with 967 points, Education in Austria, 843 points, Institutionalized representation with 831 and finally Employment Services with only 729.

Of the 350 people who have added their own thoughts it was remarkable that the most mentioned was the will to recieve Austrian television (not because it’s so bad!), culture, questions of taxes and legal issues and many others, which I’ll not name here in detail. Should you be interested in further information you cna dpwnload a pdf here (in german).

The final findings will be published in more detail during a conference in the beginning of September of this year.

by Daniel Botz – E-Voting.CC

The paper and the electronic votes will be counted on the 28th and hence the result should be available  around Thursday evening.

The voting system was programmed by the Spanish E-Voting specialist Scytl and is hosted at the Austrian Federal Computation Center. The Austrian Ministry of Science and Research is the initiator, Robert Krimmer from E-Voting.CC is consulting the implementation process.

The going online of the voting system this morning went as planned. A minor problem although occurred with the Intranet connection at the BRZ but this was quickly solved and did in no way affect the voting system itself.

We are glad and also a bit proud, that this project is now successfully in the “delivery phase”, we hope everything will keep running smoothly!

Daniel Botz, E-Voting.CC

The first article deals with the upcoming student union elections in Austria. This event will mark the entry of Austria into the list of countries with legally binding electronic elections. Students will be able to cast their vote via Internet from May 18th until May 22nd – one week before the paper election. The results will be counted after the last polling stations are closed.
The intention behind this project is to give every student an easy and uncomplicated way of participating in these biannual elections and to innovate the Austrian voting procedures.

The magazine also features an article dealing with a deeper insight into the results of the CAHDE working group of the Council of Europe. A roadmap shows the different stages of E-Democratic tools how they relate to each other.

My main contribution to the magazine was an email-interview with Matthew McGregor. He works for Blue State Digital, a full service agency that offers integrated campaign design. By the way: I met Matthew on Dan Jellinek’s great e-Democracy08 conference in London, in November 2008.
In the interview we ponder about what new forms of online campaigning can do for democracy or about which lessons European politicians can learn from Obama’s unprecedented Internet presence.

Other topics are conference reviews of 2008′s most important E-Democracy events and a schedule for 2009, a book review and a market survey of companies who are specialized in E-Voting technology.

If you are interested in obtaining our magazine, which will be issued twice a year, just send us an email with you name & address to: modern-democracy@e-voting.cc
You can also download the latest issue from our website.

We’d be glad to send you your copy for free and without any obligations!

Daniel Botz, E-Voting.CC