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Part 3 Public Submissions
3.1 Introduction
By public notices in the newspapers on 11 and 14 March and by radio advertisements in the same period the Commission invited submissions from the public in relation to the secrecy, accuracy and testing of the chosen system. Submissions were to be received by 12 noon on 26 March.
Interested persons were advised that their submissions would be open to public inspection and may be published by the Commission.
162 submissions were received by post, by e-mail and on line at the Commission’s website and a list of the persons and bodies from whom submissions were received is set out
at Appendix 2.
These submissions, together with correspondence and other documentation received, were considered by the Commission.
It was the intention of the Commission to present the submissions it received as part of its first report, together with an summary and analysis of their content. However, in view of the legal constraints applying to the presentation of the other work of the Commission, it has decided to refrain from presenting the submissions at this time also.
3.2 Main Themes
The main themes of the submissions received may be summarised as follows:
- The need for a voter verified paper audit trail, to ensure that the accuracy of the results can be checked independently of the new system itself.
- the need to preserve the right to secrecy of a voter casting a blank ballot.
- the need to ensure that the final versions of the hardware and software used in the election are the precise versions that have been tested, approved and certified.
- the need for all software to be open source, to allow the wider community to check that it can generate accurate results.
- the need for parallel running of the new system with the old paper one, once more to ensure the new system is generating accurate results.
While the first two of these themes raised in the submissions relate to matters falling outside of the Commission’s terms of reference (but which are nonetheless acknowledged in this report as having a bearing on the successful implementation of the chosen system) the Commission has noted that the latter three concur broadly with the main themes of the Commission’s work as summarised in Part 4.
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