eGovernment
March 22, 2006
Using the Law to Stop Electronic Voting
A group called Vote Action is suing California to stop the use of touch screen voting systems citing security and integrity concerns.
The suit, put together by the voting rights group Voter Action, asks a San Francisco Superior Court to nullify February’s conditional certification of Diebold Election System’s AccuVote-TSx electronic voting system and ban the purchase or use of the system for the November statewide election.
“We can’t have trustworthy elections with Diebold’s voting machines,” said Lowell Finley, co-director of Voter Action who is an attorney in the case. “They are insecure and easily hacked.”
The suit also names the 18 California counties, including Alameda and Marin, that used any Diebold system in the last election.From SAN FRANCISCO / Voter group sues to ban touch-screen system
Referenced Wed Mar 22 2006 13:48:02 GMT-0700 (MST)
In Utah, it hasn’t gone to the courts—yet. An interesting development, however, was Emery County Clerk Bruce Funk turning over some of his recently delivered machines for testing and analysis. Among other issues, some of the machines weren’t even new. Of more concern were safety and security issues that the testing turned up.
While analyzing the memory storage problem, Hursti discovered a critical security hole in the foundation of the touch-screen. Then he found another in the “lobby,” and another on the “first floor.” Taken together, these present a potentially catastrophic security hole.
These are not programming errors, but architectural design decisions.From Black Box Voting - Diebold TSx touch-screen study (Part I)
Referenced Wed Mar 22 2006 13:55:05 GMT-0700 (MST)
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February 21, 2006
Social Software and eGovernment
In a recent Government Technology News article Wayne Hanson asks “Can Social Software Improve eGovernment?” One interesting thing that struck me in the opening paragraph is that he throws RSS into the pool of accepted technology. That’s saying something for RSS that I’m not sure is acknowledged much.
The article talks about blogs, referencing an article from last February that spoke about our blogging experiment in Utah when I was CIO. It also mentions wikis, del.icio.us, Flickr, and collaborative editing tools like Subetha and Moon Edit.
Unfortunately, the article reaches no conclusions and even makes a few blatant errors (calling mash-ups “social software,” for example—a classification I’m not buying). I’d be very interested in seeing where social software has been used to good effect inside Government. I’m pretty sure there are wins and having some publicity around them would do everyone some good.
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February 06, 2006
Britt Blaser on Dean Done Right
Britt Blaser’s speaking at the Berkman Center tomorrow on Lessons from Burlington. This refers to the Dean campaign headquarters and Dean’s use of Internet technology. Britt’s been very busy trying to generalize those lessons for all kinds of political activity. Should be a good show.
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February 01, 2006
XML and the Real-Time Web
In an article, worth reading, on the use of Web technologies to manage disaster recovery, David Stephenson discusses how XML increases eGovernment productivity:
Now there’s another piece of the pie from the Center for Technology in Government and New York State: a test project in which 5 New York agencies switched from HTML to XML to produce their websites. As a long-time pimp for XML’s widespread use in government as a tool to promote interoperability and data exchange in homeland security, I was ecstatic with the results as reported by Federal Computer Week’s Dibbs Sarkar:
Practicing what they preach, in CTG’s own XML implementation, Web site management costs dropped more than 75% and were matched by other productivity benefits.
a lot less time and effort (and costs) needed to manage a site: one agency’s web team saved 5 hrs. a week in production time.
easier to share information because of standardized data formats (crucial in a crisis if the same information needs, for example, to be shared by a wide range of agencies).
improved workflow management from content creation to publication, reduced time, effort and cost and consistency of content throughout multiple pages, delivery formats and devices (including PCs, PDAs and cellphones).
From W. David Stephenson blogs on homeland security
Referenced Wed Feb 01 2006 13:46:17 GMT-0700 (MST)
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January 02, 2006
Blogging and Democracy
The Senate Site is a great example of how small inexpensive tools can provide huge wins for democracy. The Senate Site is a group blog sponsored by the majority leadership of the Utah Senate, but people who aren’t senators or members of the majority party also write sometimes.
To see why I think this is a valuable tool, look at this post by Sen. Buttars on his proposed legislation to control how teachers talk about the origin of life. I think the bill is ridiculous, but I’ll save that for later. What I’m more interested in here is that there is honest conversation happening about proposed legislation. Sen. Buttars may not like this particular feedback, but I hope that doesn’t color the view of elected officials about how important this is. I think the Senate Site has become a very valuable asset in Utah’s political discourse.
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December 27, 2005
What Does This Data Tell You?
I ran across this article about the State of Mississippi’s Web site. What caught my eye was the information that the site had jumped from 49th place in Brown University’s study to 9th place. Now, I’m sure they all worked hard and that this is a great accomplishment, but the very fact that you can jump so far in a single year underscores the assertion that state Web portals really aren’t offering very much.
The truth is that we are still just playing around at level 2 of a four level eGovernment maturity model. The state eGovernment portals built to date require no change to the government organizations that underly the portal. For the most part, there’s not integration that crosses departmental boundaries and services are built from the government viewpoint, not the citizens. Moving up the maturity scale requires that we ask some very hard questions:
- Who will be responsible for building and maintaining this integrated service? Certainly each agency can be responsible for their piece, but who will be responsible for the whole?
- Who will pay for it? Many of the pieces have fees associated with them, but there’s not overall fee or appropriation that currently covers the integrated service.
- How should government be rearranged to accommodate such services and to what extent?
- After such a service is built, who is responsible for its upkeep and enhancements?
- How will we regulate the new services? Who is responsible for rule making, for example, when a service is created and maintained by various agencies and levels of government?
- Will the integration be shallow or deep. That is, do we merely build a set of web forms that feed the data to a dozen or more different data sets and business processes, or do we integrate the data and processes?
Until your state government is willing to address these questions, it’s unlikely you’ll get anything from eGovernment that matters more to you than simple convenience.
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December 20, 2005
Erasing the Digital Signature Law
I have a piece at Between the Lines about State Sen. Lyle Hillyard’s plan to repeal Utah’s digital signature law in the next term.
That’s not a bad thing since it’s not being used, but there are things Utah could do to make digital signatures work. I think Utah ought to be the first state to become a CA and issue a digital signature with every drivers license.
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December 19, 2005
More Diebold Hacking Demonstrations
The Miami Herald has an article on some recent demonstrations that aimed to show Florida officials how easy it would be to hack into electronic voting machines and change the outcome of the election. (They’ve also got some really annoying Javascript popups that mess up the page.)
BlackBox hired Herbert Thompson, a computer-science professor and strategist at Security Innovation, which tests software for companies such as Google and Microsoft.
Thompson couldn’t hack into the system from the outside. So Sancho gave him access to the central machine that tabulates votes and to the last school election at Leon County High.
Thompson told The Herald he was ”shocked” at how easy it was to get in, make the loser the winner and leave without a trace. The machine asked for a user name and password, but didn’t require it, he said. That meant it had not just a ”front door, but a back door as big as a garage,” Thompson said.
From there, Thompson said, he typed five lines of computer code — and switched 5,000 votes from one candidate to another.
”I am positive an eighth grader could do this,” Thompson said.From Herald.com | 12/15/2005 | New tests fuel doubts about vote machines
Referenced Mon Dec 19 2005 13:57:02 GMT-0700 (MST)
Of course, someone with physical access to current voting tabulation equipment could also easily skew the results of the election. These kinds of stories scare the public, but they don’t scare election officials as much because they know how bad the current systems are. Still, not something to give you warm fuzzies—you hope the new stuff will be better.
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September 27, 2005
Utah.gov is No. 1
Brown University, in its annual ranking of eGovernment Web sites ranked Utah.gov the number one State government site this year, up from third place last year. Congratulations to all involved.
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September 20, 2005
IT's Role in Improving Elections
I posted an article at ZDNet’s Government and Technology blog about the Carter-Baker report on voting:
Former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker released the final version of a bipartisan election reform report today. The two led a 21-member, privately funded Commission that offered 87 recommendations to strengthen the country’s electoral system and build confidence in the political process. Of the five primary recommendations, three have implications for government IT.From IT’s role in improving elections | ZDNet Government Blog | ZDNet.com
Referenced Tue Sep 20 2005 12:16:46 GMT-0600 (MDT)
There’s been much said of late on eVoting. I find the conclusions in this report to be well-thought out, but I’m troubled by the march to federalizing the election process. Perhaps it’s inevitable given its importance, but I’m of a mind that states could do a better job of this and figure this out on their own through some coordinating group like the National Association of Secretaries of State.
As I mention in the article, the most controversial of the proposals is probably the use of Real ID as the sole means of authenticating voters:
While Real ID generally has implications for IT, this proposal just adds to that requirement list. There are, as usual, privacy concerns. Most people don’t realize that information about whether they voted or not and in which elections, along with their party affiliation, is a public record in most jurisdictions. This proposal would make that data much more accurate, linkable and transferable between states than it has been in the past.From IT’s role in improving elections | ZDNet Government Blog | ZDNet.com
Referenced Tue Sep 20 2005 12:21:37 GMT-0600 (MDT)
This is the very real danger that any national ID card system, even one cobbled together like Real ID posses. Once you’ve got a universal identifier, you can link all kinds of information. Even if you restrict the government, someone else will. Soon we’ll be correlating whether people vote with the kind of breakfast cereal they eat.
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September 16, 2005
Orem Utah's Geocoder
Orem City’s GIS group has published a Geocoder Web service. It has one method: give it an address in Orem and you get back a geocode. Not something the average citizen will want to access, but I think it’s cool that not only have they got it, but it’s online, accessible, and published at XMethods. From the description:
This web service is mostly useful in a GIS application. Here at Orem, we have about five on-line interactive maps and three desktop applications that consume this web service. Since we update our own centerlines, the geocoder is updated whenever we make any edits to the data source. We never have to awkwardly recreate ESRI locators.
It would be interesting for someone to create a UDDI registry of eGovernment Web services.
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September 01, 2005
Official Disaster Websites Lacking
David Stephenson reviews the official Web sites of government agencies and NGOs helping with the disaster relief and finds them sadly lacking. My bet is that none of them have included their Web site or even their IT staff in their disaster planning and never thought about how they might be used.
After 9/11, when Utah’s Public Safety department was beefed up to have a ‘homeland security’ component, we had to fight for a seat at the table and found out that seats you have to fight for aren’t worth having. This is a crowd for whom radios are about as high-tech as they want to get.
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August 24, 2005
Utah Legislature Wins Online Democracy Award
The Utah Legislature won the Online Democracy award for it’s Web site. That’s cool. It really is a very good site and they’ve done a lot to add RSS, audio files of committee meetings, and other features that make it more usable. Congratulations!
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August 04, 2005
National Sex Offender Registry
I just put an article at Between the Lines that critical of the DoJ’s new sex offender registry. A check of the site yields some interesting data. First, the site is hosted by Millenium Interactive Technology in Tallahassee FL. The site is served from IIS on Windows 2003. Ugh.
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August 02, 2005
Plone Sites
Kelly Flanagan went to the Plone tutorial and reports that the government’s 5-a-day site is built on Plone with no code changes (just CSS). I love to see open source tools used on eGoverment sites.
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July 28, 2005
Making Technology Decisions in a Democracy
I put a piece up at Between the Lines this morning called When society makes technical decisions. British ID cards and eVoting…
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July 06, 2005
GovTracker: Getting Rhode Island Data
If you live in Rhode Island and want information on Board/Commission Memberships, Corporations, Elections, Lobbyist Registration, Rules and Regulations, or State Directories, you’re in luck. The Rhode Island Secretary of State’s office has just released GovTracker, a tool for getting any or all of this data as an RSS feed. The project is the brainchild of Jim Willis. I wrote a longer piece about GovTracker at Between the Lines.
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June 27, 2005
Don't Send Word Documents to Norway
Norwegian Minister of Modernization Morten Andreas Meyer announced today that “Proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government.” eGovernment sites, including Utah.gov, haven’t been as good about this as they should be. The proposal goes beyond proprietary formats and calls for proposals from the national and local governments to propose plans for using open source solutions wherever possible.
On the identity front, the plan also calls for every citizen to be given a personal electronic identifier to replace the numerous usernames that people have for interfacing with the Norwegian government. We worked on this in Utah for some time, but I don’t think it’s even been rolled out in a public way. We did two crucial infrastructural steps: (1) we created a statewide directory and (2) we passed legislation saying that personalization and other citizen information submitted for use on Utah.gov wasn’t subject to GRAMA (Utah’s version of the Freedom of Information Act) and thus could be kept private.
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April 12, 2005
Legislative Podcasting
A story in today’s Salt Lake Tribune highlights some of the Utah Legislatures eGovernment initiatives. The Legislature’s site does a good job of letting you find bills, see amendments, find out who voted for what, and so on. The have a bill tracker system that will email you changes to the status of a bill. I’m not sure why they haven’t yet added RSS feeds for that as well. They do have an RSS feed for legislative news items which is helpful. Apparently they’re giving some thought to legislative podcasting as well:
The Legislature already has ventured into cyberspace to allow Internet users to listen to or watch its floor debates in real time and the Web site hosts a library of information, including rosters of past lawmakers, years of legislation and a citizen’s guide to lawmaking. And there may be more soon. Allred, at the request of lawmakers, is researching whether the Legislature will put the live audio of committee hearings online and also include clips of those meetings with each bill.From Salt Lake Tribune - Utah
Referenced Tue Apr 12 2005 08:12:39 GMT-0600 (MDT)
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March 10, 2005
Wireless Access at the Capitol
One of the bills that didn’t get much air time last session was Senate Bill 100 which gives the Capitol Preservation Board (the group that manages the Capitol Complex) the authority to offer free Wi-Fi to the public at the State Capitol. The bill passed (no Senators and three Representatives dissented) and has been signed by Gov. Huntsman. Of course, the Legislature was doing this unwittingly several years ago. Now, its official!
Seriously, I think this is a good thing. I’m not sure the Legislature realizes that this gives everyone sitting in a hearing the ability to google anything they say and look up information on-the-fly. This evens the playing field a little.