ACTIVITIES :: eTen :: Library :: LADISPOLI TESTS ELECTRONIC VOTING
LADISPOLI TESTS ELECTRONIC VOTING
- 26,500 citizens have electronic voting
- From bars and supermarkets, thanks to 80 multimedia booths set up all over the town
On Sunday, 26th September, Ladispoli tested electronic voting at the three municipal referendums, concerning protection of archaeological sites, participative budgeting and involvement of immigrants in political life.
In the case of Ladispoli - which follows the trials that have taken place in Avellino, Campobasso and Cremona -, this trial concerns all the town's residents on the electoral roll and not just one section or sample: 24,000 citizens, that is all the inhabitants of Ladispoli and 2,500 immigrants duly registered.
The initiative falls into the scope of the E-poll project. E-poll is receiving funding from the eTEN programme of the European Commission. The project’s objective is to test electronic voting in Italy and France. Siemens Informatica is a partner in the consortium, as technical coordinator. Other partners are the Italian and French Home Office, Vodafone and France Télécom. The Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato is also a sponsor of the project. Sun Microsystems has contributed by supplying the systems based on Linux and Solaris(tm).
The voting took place without the need to go to a pre-determined polling station. In fact, 80 multimedia booths, designed by Pininfarina, easy to use and secure, were placed all over the town, from supermarkets to bars and swimming pools. A "mobile" booth also reached the houses of those who, for various reasons, could not travel. In short, even around ten citizens currently resident in Paris were able to vote: an electronic booth was also in operation at the Italian Consulate in the French capital.
The electronic cards, containing fingerprints and registration details, were distributed in the days leading up to the vote. The voter is identified on the basis of the comparison between the print memorised on the card and that detected by a reader. Once identified, the citizen can then proceed to vote, still using the card.
Subsequently, the details relating to identification of the voters and the voting operations were sent to the servers at the Home Office, whose job it was to decode and count the results. The data were transmitted through the modems installed in the booths, that use the GPRS communication platform.
The votes were counted at 9:00 pm on the same day, when the Mayor of Ladispoli and the Town Clerk simultaneously inserted the electronic keys for decoding the votes stored in the electronic system of the Home Office's Electoral Department.
The innovation of this new trial over the previous ones of the E-Poll project was the use of a prototype print set-up, built into the system architecture, comprising a removable printer and a sealed ballot-box containing the hard copy of the votes cast, that at the end of the session is taken out from the printer and opened only for a possible manual count.