Sad news, indeed.

Twenty days ago, I reported a “small” problem with e-voting in Italy. This is the sad (for now) conclusion of that story, again courtesy of F. Pietrosanti (*), president of the italian group for transparency and digital human rights Associazione Hermes

As I explained here had filed an official FOIA request to know more about a mysterious “ad hoc commission to evaluate e-voting for Italians living abroad”.

This week, Pietrosanti reported that:

The second FOIA request about the Commission on e-voting has been entirely rejected:

• Both the part requesting access to emails exchanged among its members, that where specifically related to their work in the Commission
• and the part requesting access to the draft of any document that may have been prepared

So, as things stand now, Italians remain without any information about the work of their official Commission on E-Voting that takes no minutes of its meeting, and eludes its formal obligation of transparency.

Thanks to Pietrosanti, all the documents available about this rejected FOIA request are available here.

As of now, the worst, most worrying part of the story is the fact that no italian political body has anything at all to say about this rejection. Including the whole italian Parliament, its own internal Committee for the Security of the Republic - COPASIR, the Intelligence System for the Security of the Republic (DIS), and the other security authorities in the diagram above, from the official COPASIR english page.