California, probably the most forward thinking state in terms of eVoting initiatives, are working out the kinks of their current system. The Seretary of State's office has recently released an Report from their Ad Hoc Touch Screen Task Force.
Nothing especially earth shattering in the report, though the directive that all touch screen voting systems must include an accessible voter verified paper audit trail (VVPAT) is a step in the right direction, and should qualm many fears about the possibility for funny business with eVoting.
A couple days ago I wrote about how eGov initatives have yet to save the time and money they've promised. Well, I just ran across this article that says the problem aren't the initiatives themselves, but rather that not enough people know about them to make them viable alternatives to traditional interaction methods. This is another one of those polls/reports that for sets out to prove an obvious idea - that the more people who know about something, the more people will use it. I usually think these polls are silly, until it was pointed out to me that until someone takes the time to do this kind of report, the only thing you have to make your case to managers is your opinion. With budgets getting slashed so harshly, a report like this can assure your project can get the marketing budget it'll need to make the project worthwhile.
Here is a direct link to the official GSA report.
In the UK eGovernment costs outstrip savings. Most of the deficeit is made up of the start-up costs of these initiatives, but savings wont catch up to costs until at least 2012, it is estimated. One of the big selling points for eGovernment is the potential cost benefits of reduced staffing, beuracracy, etc and if these benefits aren't visible for another decade, and I'm worried that legislators might cool on their support because eGovernment, and the Internet in particular, isn't just a fad, but a tool that will be a crucial element in the operation of every organization in the future. I'm sure it was quite expensive to have telephones and electricity installed in government facilities a hundred years ago, but it was unqestionably worth it and necessary. I hope people realize that when it come eGov.
An interesting article on the state of eGovernment in South Korea. Their $251 million project, which began last November, has since lost 2/3 of its traffic since debuting. The program relies heavily on public kiosks and severeal of those kiosks have already been shut down because of disuse.
I don't read Korean well enough (at all, really), to judge the Korean eGov site, but I hope that usability is the problem, rather than that this speaks about the potential of the use of kiosks to bridge the digital divide.
Whatever the cause of the failures, the current problems don't bode well for what was supposed to have been the world's first eGovernment.
England has a pretty comprehensive effort to e-enable their government services. I haven't read through the entire strategy document, but it seems that, while the US federal government's strategy involves consolidating activities to a few central departments, the UK policy enourages more activity at the local level.
I suppose that has something to do with the way our constitution was written, what with state's rights and decentralized government and all that, but it will be interesting to contrast the effectiveness of a top-down vs. a bottom-up development strategy. It seems like the UK has an immediate edge, because concentrating on local iniatitives will allow them to deliver new services more quickly (for example, they speculate that the elements for eVoting could be in place as early as 2008), but the US strategy has a long range benefit in creating a stable platform to support more ambitious future expansions. We'll see.