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

Open Source?

[mfh]

> 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.

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.

IQ(Irelander) > IQ(USian)

[Anonymous Coward]

Evidence, at last!

E-voting

[JosKarith]

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."

interesting

[spangineer]

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.

Woohoo! Yes!

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

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...

That is the way the Constitution works

[Anonymous Coward]

"Too bad for the US. I can't be the only one that feels that, come November, we will have a president that once again did not get a majority vote."

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.

Give me a break

[Jack Wagner]

We can send a friggin space shuttle to outer space and back but we can't make a secure e-voting machine???? How hard is that????

Well, at least we've got the "free porn on the Internet" technology all worked out.

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.