Reply #16: Japan: Future of e-voting in doubt, Discussion needed to ease fears about touch-screen machines [View All]

[rumpel]

Yomiuri Shinbun

Ryota Akatsu / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

A bill designed to introduce electronic voting in national elections has been left up in the air due to worries about the system's reliability.

The bill to revise the law on special provisions of the Public Offices Election Law has been carried over to the current Diet session at the House of Councillors after the House of Representatives passed it in the extraordinary Diet session.

The ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party and New Komeito and the main opposition Democratic Party of Japan previously agreed on passing the bill, but the DPJ has since changed its position and demanded revisions to the bill.

E-voting was permitted from February 2002 only for local governments that established ordinances on it.

In June that year Niimi, Okayama Prefecture, was the first municipality in the country to introduce the system for mayoral and municipal assembly elections. Since then 10 municipalities have used e-voting machines in 16 elections. The system is to be used in some areas in the Feb. 17 Kyoto mayoral election.

To speed up the vote counting in national elections, the ruling camp submitted the bill to the ordinary Diet session last year in a lawmakers-initiated form. Under the intended law, local governments with electronic voting ordinances would be approved to use the system in national elections based on applications.

The DPJ seized on promotion of the system in its campaign pledges. The three parties reached in-party arrangements and agreed in December to pass the bill into a law within fiscal 2007.

The revision bill passed through the lower house smoothly during the extraordinary session and was believed to be on its way to becoming a law without any problem.

However, the situation suddenly changed during deliberations at the upper house Special Committee on Political Ethics and Election System due to questions raised by a DPJ member, and consequently the bill was carried over to the current Diet session.

DPJ member Tetsuji Nakamura raised several concerns including:

-- There are fears that voting records will vanish due to machine trouble.

-- There are no measures to verify when illegal actions are taken in vote counting.

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20080208TDY04302.htm