The Multidisciplinary Ad Hoc Group of Specialists on legal, operational and technical standards for e-enabled voting [7] was set up by the CoE in early 2003
``...to develop an intergovernmentally agreed set of standards for e-enabled voting, that reflect Council of Europe member states’ differing circumstances, and can be expected to be followed by the ICT industry.'' [9]
It is their recommendations that are the subject of this paper.
The document they produced (from now on referred to as ``the standards'') acknowledges that it cannot be judged in isolation. It states that it should respect:
``the obligations and commitments as undertaken within existing international instruments and documents, such as [...]''
The list of 12 instruments that follows -- though it is clearly not meant to be exhaustive -- covers a diverse range of documents, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Charter of Local Self-Government and the Convention on Cybercrime. It also includes the Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters [10], which was produced by the Venice Commission 1.
This inter-related set of complex documents is analagous to a software system which has evolved over time, in response to ever changing sets of requirements. The system depends on a large number of other systems, and the environment of the system (the context in which it is being used) is not clearly understood. With such legacy systems, one often reaches a stage where the system's operation can only be maintained through a restructuring (re-engineering) of the system and its architecture. Many techniques exist for this task, one of which is known as reverse engineering. We propose reverse engineering of the e-voting standards, with focus on arriving at a set of documents that can be usefully applied at the requirements capture stage of e-voting development.