(a brazilian electronic ballot box in use- it can't be seen perfectly at this photo, but there's a LCD that displays the picture/photo of the candidate when the voter introduces the correspondent numbers of a candidate - There are 480,000 machines as this in use in Brazil)

The electronic ballot boxes to be used in the election of 2008, which chooses the new mayors and councillors from all over Brazil, inaugurate the use of Linux operating system, and in three counties selected for testing, the use of biometrics for identification of voter.

 The initiatives are part of the strategy of the Electoral Superior Court (TSE) “to improve the security and the transparency of the process”, according to Giuseppe Dutra Janino, secretary of technology of the information of the TSE.

 According to Janino, in interview to Reuters, “it has some campaigns in the direction to stain this process”, but, in the 12 years where Brazil if uses of electronic ballot boxes, “no fraud was proven”, affirmed.

 The decision to substitute the operational systems VirtuOS and Windows CE for the Linux in 100 percent of the 480 a thousand ballot boxes of the country will have three advantages, in accordance with the secretary.

 “One of them is the economy”, according to it, since the government agency will not have more than to buy licenses of the old systems proprietors.

 He recognizes that softwares were necessary to be developed in order to use the the Linux system, but standes out that “the cost of the paid development is by far under the costs of the Windows licenses”.

 The cycle of contract of new ballot boxes (buying new ones) is of two years, in accordance with the demographic growth. Brazil has 130 million voters currently, number that on average grows 6 percent per each two years, according to the executive.

 Another advantage of the choice of the Linux, according to Janino, “is the transparency of the process”. According to him, with the old systems proprietors, the TSE (Brazilian Electoral Court) had difficulty in opening the codes of programming of the ballot boxes to entities as the Bar Association of Brazil (OAB) and the political parties.

 From 180 days of each election, the TSE opens all the lines of codes for these electronic ballot boxes, to certify its legitimacy, before the ballot boxes are sealed up digitally.

 The third advantage, in accordance with the secretary, is the security. “Software (Linux) is robust and admittedly safe”, it affirmed Janino.

 Another technological innovation of the electoral process of this year will be the presence of a external auditorship. In all election, a commission commanded for the judge of the electoral court chooses some ballot boxes to follow its performance in the day of the election.

  In this year, however, the process, that already counts on cameras that film the operation of the ballot box, also will have the presence of the auditorship Moreira and Associados, selected to follow the process.

  Brazil has 27 regional electoral districts and, in each one of them, four ballot boxes are drafted for the auditorship, as Janino explained.

 FINGERPRINT

 In another initiative to guarantee the security of the process, the TSE will implant the biometric identification of the voter in three cities, as part of a test.

 “As we eliminate the intervention of human beings in the verifications, we extend the credibility of the process”, affirmed Janino.

 The biometry is characterized for identifying the user through some unique characteristic of his/her body. The TSE will make, in this test, identification by the fingerprint, but the system is also able to identify the voters by the face.

 In this year, the cities of Fátima of Sul (MS), João Baptista (SC) and Colorado of Oeste (RO), that together concentrate around 45 thousand voters, will be the first ones to adopt the byometric identification .

 “We eliminate the possibility of a voter to vote in the name of another person”, said Janino, and beyond that, the identification process is in charge of the proper voter, and no more of a member of the electoral court.

 Janino explains that board members and voters already had passed for simulated in these regions. “The digital culture were already spread in these three cities”, said it.

 The secretary explains that, since 2006, all the acquired ballot boxes are equipped to allow the biometric identification. Therefore, in accordance with the rhythm of renewal of the equipments, he esteems that “in a period of five the ten years” the resource will be extended for all the country.

Americans will soon be able to use Xbox Live to register to vote in the November presidential elections.

Microsoft has signed a partnership with activist group Rock The Vote to boost interest in the upcoming election among young people.

As part of the tie-up Xbox Live members will also be able to take part in polls to gauge their voting intentions.

A forum on Xbox Live will also be used to gather opinions from gamers that will be shared with candidates.

Party politics

"To realise our goal of registering two million young Americans by this fall, we need to go where young Americans are," said Heather Smith, executive director of Rock the Vote, in a statement. "There's no doubt in our minds that many are on Xbox 360 and Xbox Live."

Microsoft said that the Rock The Vote campaign to use Xbox Live would begin on 25 August.

In the past Rock The Vote has also worked with MySpace to encourage bands that promote their music via the social networking site to get fans to register to vote.

Through the partnership with Rock The Vote, Microsoft is also planning to have a presence at the Republican and Democrat party conventions to educate politicians about it and its members views.

Some aspects of Xbox Live are free but for a monthly fee members can take on other console owners in online games. In the UK the annual fee for the service is £39.99.

In May 2008 Microsoft announced that it had 12 million subscribers for Xbox Live spread across 26 countries.

During many years, then Brazilian goverment fought to develop an eletronic voting system to counter the giantesc electoral problems of the past, such as frauds, pressures of local leaders, etc.

The fact is, after more than a decade of developments, the eletronic voting system is a reality and it cooperated to change - a little bit - the reality of the Brazilian political structure.

The system itself is presented as a very safe combination od technologies, but not exactly expensive. It's a terminal with an autonomous operating system wich uses a very strong encryption key, which renders the system practically inviolable. Surelly one should argue that mantaining such material over ther years - and upgrading it constantly - would cost a lot of money for an event that occurs only once in a couple of years... But hey, if the Brazilians made that, why other more developed countries can't?

The answer: well, with a system that reduces the chances of error to zero, that can give us the results in the same day AND can't be recounted due an court order... Well, that really doesn't seem an advantage... Can you imagine America today without a certain "little manipulation" from the recent past? Well, I can.

Perhaps the most powerful - but largely invisible - force shaping our digital media reality is the role of interactive advertising and marketing. Much of our online experience, from websites to search engines to social networks, is being shaped to better serve advertisers. Increasingly, individuals are being electronically "shadowed" online, our actions and behaviors observed, collected, and analyzed so that we can be "micro-targeted." Now a $20 billion a year industry [2007 estimates] in the U.S., with expected dramatic growth to $80 billion or more by 2011, the goal of interactive marketing is to use the awesome power of new media to deeply engage you in what is being sold: whether it's a car, a vacation, a politician or a belief. An explosion of digital technologies, such as behavioral targeting and retargeting, "immersive" rich media, and virtual reality, are being utilized to drive the market goals of the largest brand advertisers and many others.

A major infrastructure has emerged to expand and promote the interests of this sector, including online advertising networks, digital marketing specialists, and trade lobbying groups.

The role which online marketing and advertising plays in shaping our new media world, including at the global level, will help determine what kind of society we will create.

* Will online advertising evolve so that everyone's privacy is truly protected?

* Will there be only a few gatekeepers determining what editorial content should be supported in order to better serve the interests of advertising, or will we see a vibrant commercial and non-commercial marketplace for news, information, and other content necessary for a civil society?

* Who will hold the online advertising industry accountable to the public, making its decisions transparent and part of the policy debate?

* Will the more harmful aspects of interactive marketing - such as threats to public health - be effectively addressed?

Yahoo! "Smarts" Are Your Loss of Privacy

"Many marketers haven't had the ability to tailor their display advertising messages at scale for different segments," said Yahoo spokesperson Gaude Paez, who described SmartAds as "Real-time custom advertising."...SmartAds makes heavy use of "customer insights" extracted from data Yahoo keeps on visitors, including their shopping, searching and Web surfing behaviors, as well as registration information and location data. The portal hopes the move will encourage large direct marketers to invest more heavily in online display ads, Paez said.

Yahoo's New SmartAds Product Aims to Ease Creative Production. Zachary Rodgers. July 2, 2007. ClickZ.

This Targeted Ad is for You--and Only You

"Marketers are taking great pains to create better-targeted online campaigns...

Yahoo's product, coined SmartAds...switches in text-based offers and simple graphical elements on the fly, based off behavioral targeting data. But Yahoo is not alone in trying to help marketers come up with more versions of better-targeted creative without significantly increasing the dollars they've always spent on single, mass messages. Real Time Content, which is partially funded by British Telecom... hopes to serve up the most relevant content -- entertainment, news and advertising content -- on the fly based on information that's known about the consumer and is having discussions with ad network Blue Lithium to help it cull that data.

"If I'm a soccer mom and you shot this nice ad on a road in Scotland, am I likely to test drive?" asked Naj Kidwai, CEO of Real Time Content. "No. But if you shot an ad that speaks directly to me I'm likely to answer the call to action."

Yahoo, Others Work to Up Relevance of Online Ads. Abbey Klaassen. Ad Age. July 2, 2007 [sub. required]

Mobile Behavioral Targeting: "A Heat-seeking Missile"

[interview with Bob Walczak, CEO of mobile ad network MoPhap]

"What we do is identify users by device and identify their device as they enter a site on our publisher network. From there we can aggregate information and create a behavioral profile based on a variety of criteria. Our approach to behavioral targeting is then geared to bringing the three main components online advertisers have grown accustomed to into the mobile sphere, telling them who users are, what they do in real time and what ads they tend to be most responsive toward. If you can combine the three in a mobile context, you've got a heat-seeking missile. You've also finally leveled the playing field somewhat between mobile and online... For one thing, the intent of mobile searchers and browsers is far more directly related to actionable intent and information, so the quality of targetable information is far more relevant... In theory what it entails is knowing not just that a consumer is interested in shopping for a car, or even that their tastes seem to run in the direction of auto type A versus auto type B, but the chain of personalized decision criteria and the decision-making process."

by Geoff Andrews



This is the election that few Italians wanted. One of the failures of Romano Prodi's disputatious government, elected by a narrow majority in the election of 9-10 April 2006, was the strengthening of the belief among its citizens that Italy's political class was more remote than ever. La Caste (as Sergio Rizzo & Gianantonio Stella have described Italy's political elite) - better paid and more numerous than its European peers, overwhelmingly male and more likely to have been involved in criminal activities - is seemingly entrenched in power.

An early election has been inevitable since Prodi resigned on 24 January 2008 after losing a vote of condfidence in the senate. Nothing that has happened since then - certainly not the campaign populism of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi or the studied moderation of emergent centre-left leader Walter Veltroni - has altered the belief in La Caste's enduring position.

The campaign for the the vote on 13-14 April 2008 has been lacklustre. It has come to life only in its final days, when Berlusconi raised the stakes (as he did in the 2006 election) by warning of centre-left cheating and voting irregularities. Veltroni's response was first to call for his rival to respect the constitution and then to repeat the claim made by the Economist in July 2003, that Berlusconi was "unfit to govern".

Silvio Berlusconi's record

But the question is not merely who is fit to govern, but whether Italy can be governed. The election is being conducted under an absurd electoral system bequeathed by Silvio Berlusconi shortly before the 2006 election and designed to prevent a clear majority from emerging. It is arguable that the most likely outcome of this or any other election taking place under such rules is that Italy will become (or remain, some would argue) virtually ungovernable (see "Italy's governing disorder" [31 January 2008]).

Yet Italy needs to elect a government capable of reforming its institutions and to revive a sluggish economy. Italy's economy underwent rapid decline during Silvio Berlusconi's second period in office between 2001-06 (the first had lasted only from April 1994 to January 1995); and while Romano Prodi reduced the spiralling public-spending deficit, the economy is still in a perilous condition. Ten years ago, Italy had surpassed the British economy in respect of the citizens' purchasing power and was second only to Germany among the leading five European Union economies. Now, it has fallen behind Spain and Greece, a statistic that few of Italy's political class are willing to admit. It is now second-last amongst the fifteen pre-enlargement EU countries; on current projections, according to the Italian think-tank Vision, will be overtaken by the ex-communist countries over the next decade.

The economic record of the previous Silvio Berlusconi government, his unresolved "conflicts of interest" as media entrepreneur and prime minister, and his ineptness as a statesman make many Italians as well as those of other nationalities wonder how it is possible that he might win again. Berlusconi himself has no doubts. His election slogan, Rialzati Italia ("Get Up, Italy") reflects his belief that his success as an entrepreneur can lift the aspirations of his people. His usual populism has shaped his campaign strategy, which has included his claim that he has a business plan waiting to buy out the ailing Alitalia. When asked by a young woman what he proposes to do for people like herself struggling on a low income, his response was that she should marry a millionaire like his son. Worryingly, she took his answer in good faith and will probably vote for him. It is a measure of the inability of Romano Prodi's government to make significant economic change that Berlusconi is still able to do this.

by Jonathan Wheatley

The so-called "rose revolution" in Georgia, when peaceful street protests against falsified parliamentary elections sparked in November 2003 eventually forced out the incumbent president, Eduard Shevardnadze, created optimism that the country would move towards full democracy. More recent events suggest that the path remains elusive.

Jonathan Wheatley is research fellow at the AARAU Centre for Democracy in Switzerland. He is the author of Georgia from National Awakening to Rose Revolution: Delayed Transition in the Former Soviet Union (Ashgate, 2005)

The state of emergency imposed for nine days in November 2007, when opposition television channels were closed and opposition activists arrested, vividly illustrated the lack of progress from post-Soviet authoritarianism to European democracy. True, many of the decisions taken during the state of emergency were later revoked, but the conduct of the presidential elections held on 5 January 2008 undercut hopes for a clean process. Administrative resources (such as the distribution of healthcare vouchers to pensioners and other vulnerable groups) were used throughout the pre-election period to cajole or even intimidate voters into electing Mikheil Saakashvili as president, and the OSCE described 23% of the vote counts it observed as "bad" or "very bad".

This assessment represents an improvement on the "high watermark" of vote-falsification observed under the presidency of Eduard Shevardnadze in the 2000 presidential elections, and the November 2003 parliamentary elections that precipitated the rose revolution - but it remains considerably worse than the parliamentary and presidential elections held in 2004 (which confirmed Saakashvili in power). The narrow margin of Saakashvili's first-round victory (he was declared to have won 53% of the votes cast, just above the 50% needed to avoid a second-round run-off) leaves it unclear whether or not the irregularities observed during the vote count had a decisive influence in the outcome.

A blocked transition

Since the end of communism, Georgia appears to have remained trapped as what is known as a "hybrid regime", incapable of either consolidating hard authoritarianism or democracy. This appears to contradict the "transition paradigm" that has hitherto defined how post-communism is viewed. This paradigm portrays transition as a uni-directional process, with post-communist regimes transforming themselves from Soviet-style totalitarianism (or post-totalitarianism into democracies. Recent developments in Georgia and other former Soviet republics show that post-communist reality may be somewhat more complex as regimes appear to "get stuck" halfway between authoritarianism and democracy (as in the case of Georgia and Moldova) or even slip backwards into authoritarianism after limited democratisation (as in Russia and Belarus).