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Ireland Rejects E-Voting for Upcoming Elections
colmmacc writes "Following months of lobbying by groups such as Irish Citizens for Trustworthy Evoting and a damning and comprehensive report by Ireland's Commission on Electronic Voting, the Irish Minister for the Environment has bowed to pressure and conceded that the system has not been proven safe and has decided not to use Evoting for the forthcoming elections on June 11th.. This is a very welcome move following 6 months of indignation on the part of the Minister and refusals to meet with concerned groups."
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
AFAIK, the proposed electronic voting system in Ireland was going to have a paper trail. The voter would be given a printout which would be put in a ballot box and used for recounts.
As an Irish person myself, I should have found out for sure what the situation was! Can someone confirm or deny this?
All I know for sure is that they weren't considering Diebold. The system was called Nedap or something.
Either way though, I'm against any electronic voting.
After all gnu.free's website says:
Governments indicate they'd like a secure e-voting system. If the open source movement can't deliver one, we can bet a private closed source company will.
His full title is "Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government" - elections in Ireland have always fallen under the remit of Environment.
It's more of an interior ministry than an environment (in the sense of "green" issues) ministry.
E-voting in Ireland has caused much controversy in the last 6 months or so. The main objection to the system proposed for use in the European and local elections are that there is no paper trail for validation. The Irish Labour Party Published a report at the end of 2003 about the proposed system to be used in Ireland and the flaws in that system. All of the Irish political parties are for e-voting in principal; the main advantage from their point of view is that the long wait through numerous rounds of counts would be eliminated during the counting process. The long manual counting procedure is due the proportional representation voting system used in Ireland.
Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. G.B Shaw
Because he is in charge of election campaigns for the governing party.
That's not strictly the correct answer but it is shockingly true.
here
The system was only piloted in a few areas during the last election and even those pilots were flawed.
It was piloted in my constituency.
You should read the report before making any comments about the accuracy of the count. If the Commission don't think it is accurate, how can you suggest it is ?
Are you just trolling? Why don't you RTFA. That's not what they said at all:
They just haven't had enough time to do rigorous testing in time for the next elections, but they do think it's accurate from what they've seen so far.
My operat~1 system unders~1 long filena~1 , does yours?
While it's true no American president was ever elected with a minority of the electoral vote,
[BZZT!]
"I'm sorry, thank you for playing, next contestant please..."
John Quincy Adams, 1824. Andrew Jackson had both a higher popular vote and electoral college vote, but neither had a majority. Under constitutional provisions, the top three candidates were voted on by the house; the fourth threw his support behind Adams, giving him enough for a victory. (Additional reference source)
The 1876 Hayes/Tilden election also might qualify, as an electoral commission of dubious provenance decided the fates of votes from 4 disputed states, with Hayes finally winning by a single electoral vote.
And, of course, the Florida electoral votes would have been enough to swing the 2000 election, if you want to bring those shenanigans back up....
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Presidents who didn't get a majority of the popular vote:
George W Bush (2000) {debatable, depending on your beliefs about the diverse recounts, including the ones that didn't make the news)
William J Clinton (1996)
William J Clinton (1992)
Gerald Ford (unelected) (our only president who was never elected to either presidency or vice-presidency)
Richard M Nixon (1968)
Woodrow Wilson (1912)
Grover Cleveland (1892)
Benjamin Harrison (1888) (not only did Harrison have less than a majority of the popular vote, he had considerably fewer popular votes than his opponent, Grover Cleveland)
Abraham Lincoln (1860)
I got bored of removing pop-unders when I got to Lincoln, and stopped looking. As can be seen, more than a few (at least 8 of 43) presidents did not win the popular vote. Some of our best presidents (Lincoln is widely considered to be in the top 2), as well as some of our worst (Richard Nixon comes to mind), as well as some eminently forgettable presidents (Grover Cleveland, the only president to serve two non-sequential terms) were so elected. The Republic managed to survive quite nicely, thank you.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
The Electoral College was meant to make sure that the President was elected by the States, as opposed to by the People. Quite deliberately, I might add. Remember that "United States" was a plural back then, and did not become singular till 1865.
It also served the useful purpose of convincing the smaller states to ratify the Constitution, without which this would all be moot. Smaller states had a quite reasonable fear that a popularly elected president would allow Virginia and New York to effectively control the country (yes, once upon a time, Virginia was an IMPORTANT state)
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
lots of background info available at http://www.electronicvoting.ie/english/download.ht ml
seems there are 2 levels of testing
1- does the 'box' on the day record all data correctly ?
2- does the software that later analyses that data and declares the winners work correctly ?
seems they focused mostly on the later
interesting bits...
"Given the developer's postponement of implementing referential integrity in the database....."
"..uses Access97.." _nuff said_
I may actually vote now
I live in Ireland an I can tell you that the government over here is pretty bad. Ineffective, unpopular and VERY corrupt. Former prime ministers buying islands and having offshore accounts sort of thing(I'm very serious)
Basically the government here is that new kind of "low taxes and more public services!!" type scam that constantly gets re-elected. Electronic voting was brought in, just to save money. No other reason.
Unfortunatly due to a COMPLETE lack of tech savvy the system will likly be a botch up. I would guess that MI6 have hacked it already. Not that I'm aanti-british republician mind. I just think that any secret service worth its salt would have looked into this by now. On top of that, thanks to the PR(Proportional Representation) voting system over here, elections would be very easy to rig. Just a few preference tweaks here could seriously alter the shape of governments.
Ultimatly I'm against the current system of electronic voting, be it closed OR open source. Paper trails are useless if no-one really suspects corruption. It only takes a swing of 1-2% to change elections in some cases.
The old system was unreliable but VERY secure from fraud, because so many people were doing the counting.
The new system is reliable but very UNSECURE, because so few people (developers, often private ones) are doing the counting.
I think a system where, as each vote was counted a number was incremented on a real time screen would be much more secure, rather than the current black box counter, which even OSS cannot avoid.
Votes would be punched by voters as usual, the taken to a counting facility. This facility would be open to the public as usual, but instead of people counting votes, the counters would place ballots under a camera, which would use recognition software to count the ballot. Perhaps the ballots could be placed on a red tabletop so the red comes through the holes or something.
The results would be incremented on a small screen, next to the counter, in REAL TIME, as well as on a big master screen. All these screens would be in constant view of the public so they could physically SEE the votes being counted. This way we keep the security of a COMPLETELY scruitinisable system, while getting the benifit of the accuracy of computers.
In other words instead of electronic voting we have votes counted electronically.
Although this system would not work well for PR voting, it would work very well for the voting methods in the UK or US.