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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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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