The BBC news ticker currently has the following two stories at the top:

George W Bush formally declares his intention to contest next year’s US presidential election.

Italy acts to stop gangsters using hi-tech 3G video phones to rig forthcoming elections.

But how will the Italian cops stop the gangsters? They don’t have jurisdiction this side of the Atlantic. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to use the Mounties?

More seriously, the Italian story is fairly interesting. The Mafia are encouraging people to use video phones to send them pictures of their ballots to show that they voted the correct way. I hadn’t thought of this before, but obviously new technology poses a threat to the secret ballot. I’m not really sure how you stop this, save by having relatively open polling places, where you can see whether someone is using a phone, but not see how they are voting. Perhaps this can be done, but when the video phones get smaller, this might start to pose more and more of a challenge.