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."

Comments

Re:Open Source?

[TopShelf]

It should be noted that the commission didn't find any particular flaw that prevented them from recommending the system, but rather they felt they didn't have time to properly vet it:

The Commission has identified and acknowledged the benefits of electronic voting and the fact that the selected system can accurately and consistently record voter preferences. It emphasises that its conclusion is not based on any finding that the present system will not work, but on the desirability of allowing time for further testing and quality assurance. The Commission makes detailed and valuable recommendations for the conduct of this further testing.

Re:Open Source?

[Albanach]

So are we going to see some concerted work on an open source alternative.

After all gnu.free's website says:

On the 25th October 2002 The FREE e-democracy Project (who supported and organised GNU.FREE's development) formally stopped production and support of the GNU.FREE Internet voting system.

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.

E-voting

[farmerj]

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.

Re:Paper trail

[ectoraige]

As another Irish person, please find out, and complain loudly! :)

First off, The system was called Nedap/Powervote, Nedap is a company based in the Netherlands.

Secondly, there was not going to be any paper trail, and this was one of the main reasons for objections. Most of the objectors agreed in principle with the concept of electronic voting, but not the Nedap implementation.

There are obstacles to having a paper trail due to the quirks of our system of voting, which I'll try to explain.

In Ireland, we use a particular method of proportional representation (PR) known as Proportional Representation through the Single Transferable Vote (PR-STV), and we use this in a multi-candidate election.

What this means is that the voter marks his preference 1,2,3 etc, and more than one candidate can be elected per voting area.

A quota of votes establishes how many votes a candidate requires to be elected.

When a candidate is elected, the excess (no. of votes over the quota) is transferred to other candidates in another round of voting, according to the next preferences indicated on the ballot.

Now in Ireland, we do this by taking a random sample of those votes, and distributing those next preferences proportionally. This causes a problem with using a paper trail, as you cannot guarantee that the random sample you pick in your manual count is the same random sample chosen by the computer.

This also means that your vote may not actually be counted as such - you second preference may only be counted in the statistical sense.

Ideally, you would count each vote in each round of voting - however, with Irish elections often going to 7/8 rounds of voting, it was considered too time consuming to do this in general elections. It's a close enough compromise, and means we can usually get the results within 24 hours or so.

E-voting offered an opportunity to change this, and to count each and every transfer. However, the government screwed up, and ruled this out, effectively ruling out an independent paper trail.

Incidentally, €40 million was spent so far by the Irish government, and this is the best they could come up with.

Is there any reason you are against e-voting in principle? Given that you admit to not being aware of the situation, I'm guessing this is not a considered viewpoint, one which you should consider.