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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."
> the Irish Minister for the Environment has bowed to pressure and conceded that the system has not been proven safe
Well, until an Open Source Evoting system is available, and the kinks are flushed out, many closed source systems will keep trying to get this contract or that contract. The simple fact is, they should all be designing Internet voting using the Online Banking Model, and keeping the source code open so that it can be truly stress-tested and understood.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Evidence, at last!
There is an absolute fortune waiting for the first company that can produce a reliable and secure e-voting system. So why do we see so many shoddy solutions that show their shortcomings the moment they go live?
The technology is there. It just needs someone to say "Right, let's stop pissing about and actually make something that people can have a bit of faith in."
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
You'll have some e-voting... are you sure you don't want any? Aw go on, you'll have some.
Go on go on go on go on go on go on go on go on GO ON!
Pennsylvania's primary was just a few days ago, so I was thinking about this issue. I'm a college student at Penn State (30,000+ undergrads) and on day of the primary, I heard that about 100 people voted. Meanwhile, when we had elections earlier this year for student government, a much greater percentage of the student body voted (though not a majority). The difference? To vote in the student election, we simply had to log on to the internet to vote. For the "real" election, we had to go a central building on campus.
I don't mean to say that convenience was the only consideration, because many students (myself included) used absentee ballots, but realistically, I think it's clear that many more students would vote if they were able to vote online. Online voting would probably greatly increase voter turnout throughout the U.S., simply because people wouldn't have to be late for work or skip lunch or whatever to head down to the polling place.
Obviously, security is a major issue, but it's not like voter fraud is impossible under our current system. Realistically, if done properly, I think online voting would probably do more good for our elections than anything.
if its not safe for them (perhaps indeed the whole concept is flawed), what makes you think its safe for YOU ?
its a shame people have been convinced by institutions that somehow pressing a button on an electronic machine constitutes voting in a democracy, "yeah you did vote honestly, you can trust us"
We only just got the evoting system in Ireland and used it in the last election. It seems a shame to scrap it now. It's much faster and surely more accurate than counting by hand.
Maybe all the lobbyists are the same people who lost their jobs as ballot counters ;-)
My operat~1 system unders~1 long filena~1 , does yours?
This is great, I wrote a couple of articles in the newspapers about it myself here... Thank god is all I can say. I have nothing against modernisation of voting systems, but there has to be some kind of accountability, and the government was going ahead without either a paper trail or a poll...
Hopefully we'll see a little more open source code too...
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
This has nothing at all to do with e-voting or anything like this. The reason this can happen is the Constitution, and the electoral college system. The majority vote in the US in the Presidential election has never mattered. If you want to change this, work to get rid of the Electoral College system.
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.
Well, at least we've got the "free porn on the Internet" technology all worked out.
Wagner LLC Consulting Co. - Getting it right the first time
Why are elections under the jurisdiction of the Minsiter for the Environment?
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Dear ould Martin, however, got a lackey to email me a ref number. That was the last I heard.
Serves him right!! This is a good thing for e-voting. Maybe they will address the concerns and implement a safe,secure system (that allows us to spoil our votes).
Pablo El Vagabyundo
I still assert that for the most part e-voting is a solution in search of a problem.
While there were serious discrepancies in Florida in the US 2000 Presidential Election[1], the solution to that problem is to go to a fundamentally simpler system, not one wrought with complexity.
1: Do not think for one minute they were partisan - I think it was just luck of the draw that Gore lost - and had the results been the opposite, we would have heard precisely the same level of whining from the Republican camp that we heard from the Democrats.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
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.
Nah - Cage Match
With chainsaws.
Would sort out the men from the boys.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
here
I think two of the important requirements in any voting process is the need for proof of presence and proof of intention.
In e-voting, proof of presence could be possible/feasible.
But proof of intention in e-voting is, I think a hard nut. In a physical voting/polling booth, each voter is on their own, to make up their mind and choice, with minimal outside influence, in a so call "holy ground", making a vote untaint from intention. In e-voting, the voting act can take place anywhere, and possibly subjected to a lot of outside influences, and tainting the voter intention.
I am assuming(might be wrong) e-voting means the ability to vote from anywhere with internet access. It is not clear from the report.
Hey, that's my password you are typing
Luckily the Irish were given a chance to vote on this issue, with 543,490,234 against and only 38 for electronic voting.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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.
Now, for your penance, go and get drunk on Guinness and sing something abusive about the English.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The system proposed for use in Ireland and dismissed by the Commission's report today is the Nedap/Powervote system, variants of which are used in the Netherlands and parts of Germany. It's a kiosk-based DRE system which uses glorified memory sticks to store ballot records. It was developed in apparent ignorance of the voter-verification requirement.
Because the developers used the waterfall method, and didn't find out about the audit requirement until customer acceptance testing, they baulked at the idea of going back to the drawing board, and instead bolted on a useless printout-of-ballot-module-contents facility, and called it an audit trail.
Their salesmen are very good, and the Irish Government agreed to buy the system (total cost over 40 million euros) at the height of the Florida debacle in late 2000. Since then there have been reports, objections, and all manner of outcry from IT professionals in Ireland. Even the entire Opposition (elected politicians not belonging to the ruling coalition) opposed the system. The Government maintained a constant mantra: the system is accurate, the system is thoroughly tested, you're all a bunch of Luddites for thinking differently. Eventually the Irish Computer Society joined in, and the Minister promptly accused them of being a front for the anti-globalisation movement.
The writing then being on the wall, the Government then appointed an independent Commission to examine the system and its testing, hoping for a graceful way out of the political corner. The Commission's report, however, is rather more damning than they hoped. In my personal opinion, this has more than a little to do with the fact that noted software expert David Parnas assisted the Commission, and he's a good deal more methodical and careful than Nedap/Powervote seem to have been.
--Adrian.
IQ(Irish) > IQ(*)
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
(for North Americans) Repeat the following words, quickly slurring them together:
whale oil beef hooked
Anybody want a peanut?
Cén sórt amadán thú in aon chor? Is cinnte nach bhfuil aon rud chliste le rá ag tusa!!!
Níl Éire laistigh den Ríocht Aontaithe faoi láthair, ach amháin an Thuaisceart.
ÉIRE GO DEO!!!
Ahem, yes, Ireland is indeed no longer part of the UK, apart from Northern Ireland of course, which remained a part of the UK after 1922. I'm guessing you're one of those few from the US who not only has eloquence problems, but also deficiencies in geographical and political knowledge.
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
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.