This time, it worked!
I’m going to be honest with you: I don’t know what it is that I have done today and didn’t yesterday. I have the impression that I have only checked that what I did yesterday was correct, after I received an email from the help desk of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I got worried at first, as they told me that you had to have (Mac) OS X 10.6 or above. I have 10.5.8, but the system check accepted it as compatible with the voting system (in the spirit of the Europvision: Elo, 1 point; help desk, nil point). The system check also accepted my version of Javascript and my version of Safari. Only problem: Java. The same message appeared over and over again:
Java : non installé ou la version détectée n’est pas compatible. Votre configuration ne satisfait pas les conditions requises pour pouvoir voter en toute sécurité par internet.
I made sure that the Java preferences corresponded to what the help desk; they looked like they were, but this message kept telling me something was wrong. Out of desperation, I started Firefox, and whereas it didn’t work yesterday, it did work today. Why it worked with one browser and not the other is beyond me, but here we go.
Armed with the letter that contained my login (yes, a paper letter with a scratch part, like a mobile phone top-up card. I also received an email with the login) and my password (sent by email), I logged on the voting page. The list of the 20 (yes, 20!) candidates and their alternate in my constituency (which includes the UK, Ireland, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) appeared on the screen. I was asked to select one, validate the choice and then confirm it. Once the vote confirmed, a receipt appeared on the screen, with a unique number corresponding to my vote.
You can see why some people might object to internet voting:
– The principle of the secrecy of the vote, which leads us to prevent children from entering the voting booth at the polling station, is impossible to uphold. Admittedly, this is also true in cases of proxy and postal voting, and proxy voting, and proxy voting is available across France.
– It may be easy for other people to access confidential information allowing one to vote, unless one is the kind of person who keeps her mail under lock and makes sure that access to her email and mobile phone inbox is always password protected.
– With such specific technical requirements, internet voting is not really for everyone. If your computer automatically updated to Java 7, you need to be able to delete it and download and set up version 6. Not to mention that you need a lot of patience and perseverance. A few people told me at the polling station that their brand new computer was not compatible.
– These problems have led some people to vote on shred computers or from their office computer, where confidentiality may not be secured.
And these are only some of the few problems that have been associated with remote internet voting in these elections. See links below for more on the subject:
– Very comprehensive article in Marianne
– List of complaints from the Parti Pirate website
– OWNI http://owni.fr/2012/05/23/vote-internet-francais-etranger/
– Le Monde Des aujourd’hui les Français de l’étranger votent par internet
Elodie Fabre 