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Irish Reject E-Voting, Go Back To Paper
Death Metal tips news that the Irish government has announced their decision to abandon e-voting and return to a paper-based system. "Ireland has already put about $67 million into building out its e-voting infrastructure, but the country has apparently decided that it would be even more expensive to keep going with the system than it would be to just scrap it altogether." John Gormley, Ireland's Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, said, "It is clear from consideration of the Report of the Commission on Electronic Voting that significant additional costs would arise to advance electronic voting in Ireland. ... the assurance of public confidence in the democratic system is of paramount importance and it is vital to bring clarity to the present situation." He added that he still thinks there is a need for electoral reform.
For those unaware of Ireland's electoral system, they use Single Transferable Vote, which is quite complex to count. Everyone rates the candidates in order. Counting then proceeds in a sequence of rounds where the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes distributed to the next candidate on each voter's list until one person has more than 50% of the vote. If they can manage with paper voting, anyone can.
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The e-voting machines were too hard to use when pissed.
You can still use paper in the voters hands and collect it for a fully scrutinized and auditable system.
You then mass scan the paper votes and electronically tally them. This gives fast results.
Then you do hand counted audits of the ballots that can take a day or two to verify the electronically counted tally.
The problem with the electronic system is the question of is a recorded vote the voters intent and is the record valid. Nothing beats paper (except scissors).
Unless it can reduce costs, why the rush to electronic voting in most of the world? Our election systems all appear to have built-in schedule to take into account how long it takes to tally the votes. In the US we vote in November and really have a few weeks before we need to know the results. (the president-elect needs to setup his/her office and prepare for the transition, which is why it's not more like several weeks of time)
And if you do use e-voting, why can't anyone do something cool with it? Like support anonymous voting, or public-private key systems for signed and authenticated voting.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
While it is understandable why they would feel this way, given the number of high profile problems with electronic voting machines (not to mention the electronic voting machines I've used have horrible UIs), paper voting is not necessarily more secure. Ballot fraud is as old as democracy, and from stuffed ballots to false-bottom ballot boxes, there are tons of ways to cheat. Electronic voting with a paper trail IS more secure, because it is necessary to not only cheat electronically, you also somehow have to make the paper ballots match.
As an example, Vladimir Putin fixed the most recent election in Russia (although it wasn't really necessary, since most people actually did support him, it was mainly for show), and as far as I know they use mainly paper ballots in Russia.
Qxe4
Does anyone know if e-voting substantially decreases the time it takes to validate elections? Given even this most recent election in the US, it seems like there are still legal challenges upon challenges upon challenges.
I would be very curious to know if these new e-voting systems have saved enough money, time, and costs to validate their use?
In western New York, where I grew up, we had traditional mechanical voting booths. You press a lever next to the candidate's name. When finished, you pull a larger lever to register all your votes. Votes get tallied mechanically, and when the polls close they just take the back cover off the machine and read off the numbers. Machines are then impounded and kept in a warehouse for a second go-through later. Works great.
All you have to do to get all the benefits of electronic voting is to add a wireless transmitter to the insides of these machines to send the totals in.
I'm glad to see they are staying with paper voting. I think that our society is not yet ready for important documents to exist solely digitally. Our governments and companies have not demonstrated the security necessary to keep them fully secure. Also, much of our society (especially the older ones) does not yet have the facility to use new electronic devices reliably
And kudos to the public officials that actually have the balls to scrap these voting systems they have invested heavily in to ensure a more trustworthy vote. Of course, better planning could have avoided the investment entirely, but lawyers (err, I mean governments) have never been good at long-term or large-scale project management.
They ran a limited trial - some people immediately complained that there was no way to spoil a vote on the machines. You had to select one candidate.
It should be pointed out that in addition to buying *all* the machines for the country before discovering this, a large part of that 67 million is for the cost of storage until they decided to scrap them!
We have two pretty clear choices:
What deadline? There seems to be a pretty simple formula here. The TV News folks want to report results. The people want results and watch TV until they have to go to bed. If there wasn't going to be results they wouldn't watch TV and the TV networks would lose millions in advertising - and relevancy. So they need to report results before people turn off their TVs. Really simple.
In 2000 CBS announced that Gore won just before midnight. People went to bed and showed up the next morning thinking that "their candidate won". Well, after they went to be around 2:00 AM or so it turned out that the winner was far less clear than CBS had announced. I'd say in 2008 if anyone had announced Obama as the winner and then it turned out to be McCain when official results were in, we'd be looking at cleaning up from the riots still. Maybe a revolution.
So it is simple. We either have fast results or we have riots. Because the TV News isn't going to lose millions in ad revenue and probably more in relevance. If they don't announce something, nobody will watch anymore. Or they will simply turn to a channel that announces something, anything.
How do we keep this from happening? Fast results. Or block the news programs from announcing anything based on statistics and exit polls. I don't reslly see the 1st Amendment getting rescinded for elections, so we better have fast results.
This might be one of those cases where fast is absolutely necessary and complete accuracy is secondary. Important, but secondary.
Regardless of the Irish system, and it may be as convoluted as Piece County's (Washington) Ranked Choice Voting, I think eVoting is premature. So far, all the systems shown are very hackable and much more prone to tampering than with hand counted. And, yes, I am even counting Seattle's/King Co. (Washington) and the Minnesota's recent debacles.
I'd love to go all geek on voting, but to me, its easier to count ballots and keep them honest with people standing over shoulders watching the count.
Kind of like Vegas with pit bosses. Sure, they have technology keeping things honest, but they also have humans watching the system looking for human traits.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
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We returned to paper ballots in The Netherlands about a year and a half ago. As the computers are exactly the same, it's a logical (albeit late) decision.
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What kind of a Free Software solution would you get with that? Pretty extensive and bullet proof. Now, it's all wasted money. Not to mention, other countries would also chip in, everybody's facing the same problem.
Although we call it preferential voting. It you don't get your first preference (because no-one else likes them) then your vote counts towards your second, etc.
And it's also counted by hand. Doesn't seem to be a problem with doing that.
It's mass madness to switch from paper to e-voting. What's the idea? Save on paper? Ridiculous. Faster results? Won't help if the results have been hacked with no physical record to audit. Insanity. There's somethings that aren't broke which you should never try to fix.
if you increase the complexity of a system, you increase the number of attack vectors. yes, election cheating is possible in all systems. it is just that with mechanical voting, there are 100x more schemes you can cook up than paper voting, and with electronic voting there are 100x moreschemes than even that
now fi there were some sort of proven ebenfit from doing electronoc voting over paper voting, maybe that would outweigh the security detriments of electronic voting. but there aren't any. you ocr the paper, end of story, its just about as good
electronic voting is inherently less secure than paper voting, and offers nothing better in return, and is a hell of a lot more expensive
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Can we have our money back? We really need it at the moment ;-)
...although, actually, part of my paycheck in some way or another indirectly came from those darned computers... :)
But no, I ain't giving you any
fact: show me a way to cheat on paper, i'll show you 100 ways to cheat electronically
that, and the ridiculous expense
its a no brainer
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Cool. Now can you manage to elect a mayor of Amsterdam who doesn't want to scrap everything that's good about it?
== Jez ==
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I feel that this a good thing in the short term, but bad in the long run.
When this e-voting was suggested there was a huge outcry from the technical community because the system that they were intending to introduce was a joke. On top of this, there was a general feeling that without a proper audit trail, there would be too much opportunity for corruption (and the current ruling party are not renowned for their integrity).
Both of these problems were technically solvable - but, as is common, the government was unwilling to accept that they didn't know everything.
Long term, however, electronic voting would have been a positive thing, but now the majority of the electorate will see e-voting as a bad thing without any idea why, and therefore even if the problems are solved will maintain to negative view of it.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
For those unaware of Ireland's electoral system, they use Single Transferable Vote, which is quite complex to count.
I've admit I've never been to an STV count, but in my mind's eye, I don't see how it would be complex.
You take all the ballots, and sort them into piles to people's first choice (where "1" or "X" appears). Once they the piles are sorted you count them. If there's no clear winner, you take the smallest pile, and look at people's second choice, and move the ballots there. Add the moved ballots to each pile's total.
This may be a bit time consuming, but it's not like you have to do triple integrals or something.
In Canada we usually have multiple polling stations with volunteers (both neutral and from each candidate). At the end of the night the boxes are emptied and everyone helps / witnesses the sorting and counting.
The only different between STV and 'first past the post' is that you may have to shuffle some ballots after every "round".
I'm all in favor of making things electronic, god knows I've spent the last 20 years doing so- but regardless- i'd estimate that all of us here know exactly how easy it would be for one person to interfere with a voting system, regardless of how safe it may APPEAR to be- every system is breakable, many within seconds.
Case in point- Newer isn't always better.
Although there was some anxiety about the paper audit, the main problem people had in Ireland with electronic voting was that it was too damn fast. Ireland has quite a complex voting system, there are between three and five seats for each constituency and votes are transfered, either when someone is elected with more than enough votes, or when someone who hasn't a chance is eliminated. The counts take a day or so, with disputed seats taking much longer to resolve. When the results come in the government will be a coalition, there are two large parties, one medium party, some small parties and some independents. Even within parties there is quite a range of views. While the counting is going on there is tallying, people watch the sorting and guess the result and the period of the count is important as a time of reflection on the result, the different potential results, on the countries political direction and on the possible future governments. Even when one party does well, the final composition of the government is usually unclear until the end. In the last election but one electronic voting was trialled in a small number of constituencies and people hated it, to fast, no tallies, no rumours, the candidates told the results without getting used to some likely outcome. It seemed to injure the whole ritual of democracy and the idea of it happening everywhere in every constituency seems terrible. A lot had been spent on the machines and the count at the moment is quite expensive, so it took a while to admit the trial had failed, but failed it had.
throw the expensive, fundamentally insecure electronic machine in the garbage, and use paper ballots. ocr them. save money to boot. end of story
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The real problem with using American-style electronic voting machines is that the "Change the vote to Republican" option that was such a big sales pitch here in the US doesn't work in Ireland, where the "Republican Party" is a different group of people...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Racism's amazingly flexible about who you count as the "racially different" enemy. The Irish weren't just Catholics from a different island in the British Isles, they were red-haired or non-Anglo-looking black-haired people, and talked funny even if they did speak English and not Gaelic, and they got stereotyped as drunks in an America where the dominant-culture locals were also drunk off their asses most of the time but were also starting to have rabid temperance movements. And the Brits had centuries of practice in identifying who the Celtic cultures they ruled were...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The electronic voting push was mainly because the US Republican Party got embarrassed by how narrowly they might or might not have won the election in Florida, where a Republican governor and Republican election commission official were widely accused of having rigged the vote count. Electronic voting machines were "corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative" about Republicans wanting the election results to be objective and accurate. (Not that the Democrats don't have a long history of voter fraud themselves, but at least they did it with skill and style.) And if they're a Good Thing here in the US, they're a Good Thing to push everywhere, and the voting machine companies did have sales people with quotas to make.
The push for non-verifiable voting machines probably had more to do with protecting the friends of the Republican party who were big players in the business than in actually facilitating fraud - after all, casting doubt on the trustability of the machines is casting doubt on the trustability of the Republicans, which is entirely off the message.
Also, even if the machines were trustable and auditable, they're still useful for voter fraud. In the 2004 elections in Ohio, the black urban voting precincts that were likely to vote Democrat didn't get enough of the machines, or all the parts needed to have them working, leading to hours-long lines on a rainy election day, while the suburban white Republican districts didn't have those problems. With paper ballots, it's much easier to fix that kind of problem, but with an all-electronic system and an election commissioner who'd promised to deliver pro-Republican results, it's just way too complicated, sorry, not our bad.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm sure a study could be done and I know there are already studies similar enough to prove a significant number would MISREAD the paper trail. I've seen ones on how people see something that is NOT there because they expect something else; its more than your think and increases with being tired etc.
These people are not "crazy" or stupid. Its also unfair to blame lazy people who wouldn't make an effort to verify or bother to fight it and revote (since many people vote AGAINST somebody, make the errors for the 3rd party when you hack it.) No discrimination. period.
WTF is it with not having a legit DAY OFF? Its unfair to hard working TIRED people who don't want to fight their boss. Officially, you can not be punished...We all know how little those laws really work. It has to be worth the effort/risk/loss beyond just the time involved to vote let alone figure out who to vote for with a pathetic media, less free time, and no newspaper.
If you think voting should "filter" people out, then you should be arguing something else.
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...what the implications will be for the Philippines since the people in charge of running the elections are all trying to jump on the electronic system, whilst all of the politicians still want the paper one.
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Relating to this, India's going through elections and E-Voting is being used there. We've used a different approach alltogether towards this problem and thought readers might like to read if they're interested. :)
Here's the main article covering the devices used:
http://techaos.blogspot.com/2004/05/indian-evm-compared-with-diebold.html
Here's the /. article covering that:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/14/1448230&art_pos=5
optical character recognition
those little ovals on your SAT test
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
do you actually want to be so intellectually dishonest as to suggest diebold has a monopoly on electronic exploits? and in the context of what: suggesting ocr introduces those exploits... in order to argue for a voting system which has MORE of the exploits you are referring to? that's not sleight of hand, that's just clumsy
and then you say storing paper votes is expensive. you really want to stack the price of a storage locker against a bunch of electronic voting kiosks?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The 'Irish' didn't decide anything. In fact it was decided by a few Irish politicians.
The sooner we get away from the notion that the decisions made by a handful of people have anything to do with what the majority of people in the country want, the better.
There are plenty of potential reasons why the e-voting systems bought by the Irish government might not have been used after the 2002 (two constituency general election) pilot and why they might have been ultimately ditched, as they are being ditched now.
However, the defining reason has nothing to do with technical or legal concerns. A political storm was created by various interests when the weakness of a particularly unpopular government minister (Martin Cullen) meant that he might fall under the pressure of the scandal. Emerging findings on e-voting were used to work up a furore against said minister's determination that the country would use electronic voting in all subsequent elections. The same minister was also involved in another scandal around the same time and had become a liability to the goverment party (Fianna Fail), which the opposition and media ruthlessly exposed.
Had another minister presided over the introduction of e-voting, things could have happened very differently, and possibly with some alterations, the machines would more than likely be in use now.
The e-voting machines have remained in storage ever since, however, until such a time as the government could dispose of them without causing a re-occurrence of the scandal. Now, when it is the least of the country's many problems, is a good time. The main reason why it is 'cost effective' to ditch the machines is because no matter how they are retrofitted, reprogrammed, reconstituted or reconsecrated, the Irish public would not accept e-voting in any form at any time in the foreseeable future. It would be political suicide to even suggest it.
The most comical aspect of the whole thing, is that despite the widespread belief that e-voting is faulty and too mysterious and dangerous in its operation to ever be introduced, a number of TDs (Irish members of parliament) were legally elected with the things in 2002. Nobody seems too bothered by this.
So basically, this is a local political football. Nothing to see here.
PS. Why is there a crown as the image beside the article? We didn't fight a war of independence to have crowns associated with the *Republic* of Ireland.
http://tarawatch.org
They should also get out of EU, Euro zone, UN and so forth.
1. electronic voting is clearly more expensive than pencil and paper. look at all the costs. stop being disingenuous
2. the point is, whatever subset of exploits that ocr introduces, are exploits native to electronic voting. how can you argue for a system by pointing out its failures?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
One of the most important parts of voting is that the electorate believes that the result is true and fair. We had elections in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) where the president-for-life regularly got 98% of the vote. Do you trust those results?
I am a Java software developer, I'm sure I know more about computer hardware and software than 70% of the US population, but I would find it very difficult to tell you with any confidence whether a voting machine that you set in front of me was going to count the votes accurately. Even if the voting code was open-source, are you sure you could spot a hidden back door in some gnarly C code? Instead, I have to depend on a small handful of researchers to verify the machines, or have the states do it with varying levels of competence.
On the other hand, my grandmother can sit at a card table and watch people count votes, and see if they're cheating or not. Doesn't that make more sense? Everyone is supposed to have the right to vote, shouldn't everybody be able to understand the process?
Vote by mail does not protect identity as well and has many more attack vectors for privacy.
Mailed votes here are not even counted unless the margin is close enough to trigger it (which is reasonable; but you don't feel like your voted counted.)
Mailed votes HAVE been lost; as well as turned up with discrepancies that draws their validity into question.
Far less important things are justified for national holidays. Voting is most important.
Actually, a Voting WEEK would be a far better alternative. Can't get people to volunteer? Well, then democracy doesn't matter enough to them and despotism is around the corner.
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