Seeing what happens when you sell your democratic process to an incompetent company (Diebold), a group of concerned hackers in the Netherlands have started action. Quite recently the last municipality in Netherlands, that of Amsterdam, long time being the bastion of paper ballots switched to electronic voting.
The action committee Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet (lit. “We do not trust voting computers”) requested all documents concerning the adoption and use of voting computers in the Netherlands and also specifically the Amsterdam case under the Dutch Disclosure of Public Administration Act.
Quite promptly they received a big stack of paper from the municipality of Amsterdam concerning voting computers, which they digitized and put on their wiki for anyone to peruse.
The companies supplying the machines are now scrambling to their lawyers trying to prevent the disclosure of the documents but the genie is already out of the bottle. Because the documents have been disclosed by the city of Amsterdam, Wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl cannot be forced to take them down (and are laughing their asses off).
Further the documents reveal stunning holes of security on every level of the voting process, holes in the protocols, shoddy technical implementations (the elections run Windows CE for crying out loud!), disabled virusscanners, insecure GPRS links, and laxness which amounts to an almost complete outsourcing of the democratic process in the Netherlands.
It is too early to proclaim victory, but the lid is off and the companies are scrambling in blind panic. Seems like the campaign is off to a good start.
