Electronic voting gets the nod

The government is just days away from publishing a new global standard to enable e-voting across the world.

The Cabinet Office has been working in conjunction with other governments and the international technical body Oasis (Organisation for Structured Information Standards) to bring the new XML (extensible mark-up language) schema to the table.

Anwar Choudhury, director of technology strategy for the Cabinet Office, told silicon.com the first draft of the new standard will be published later this month.

He said: "What we've done is really a huge achievement considering we only started this project six months ago. What we're really keen to do is to get this into practice as soon as possible, and get people using it and liking it."

The biggest problems he encountered were the differing demands of governments across the world with different voting methods.

The aim of the project is to provide common definitions of data via XML to make setting up e-voting systems as easy as possible. If successful the schema could be used as a basis for online voting applications across the world.

However, the specification does not go as far as tackling some of the security and authentication problems that have dogged electronic voting.

Just last month the Independent Commission on Alternative Voting Methods recommended an emergency taskforce be set up to get to grips with the issue and ensure the technology is good enough.

However, the government has so far failed to respond and is pushing ahead with trials of e-voting in local elections in May.

The XML schema - called Election Mark-up Language or EML - is just one of the XML standards the UK government is working on with Oasis.

Speaking at the XML and Web Services 2002 conference in London today Choudhury underlined the government's commitment to using web services standards such as SOAP (simple object access protocol), WSDL (web services description language) and UDDI (universal description discovery and integration) to improve government IT.

He said government work in formalising web services standards was key in getting all 500 odd government services online by 2005.