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.

Comments

Re:eVoting Premature

[Bigjeff5]

E-voting is not pre-mature. We have more than enough capability to produce secure machines. The military uses such machines all the time, and provided they follow their own security policies they are almost impossible to hack.

The problem is not that the machines were hackable, you'll never be able to get rid of hackers and there is an acceptable risk limit. The problem was that "hacking" a lot of these machines meant plugging in a USB drive and Alt-tabbing to the windows desktop to start messing with the text files that the votes were stored in. Some were slightly more secure, but even most of those were pitiful.

Why were the USB ports on these things not disabled? Why was there even physical access to the USB ports? Why were some of the systems not password locked? Why didn't they use a type of encrypted storage for the voting records? There was so much crap they didn't do with these systems, stuff that isn't even creative, you could pick up a book for $20 and learn how to do basic system hardening and it would have been 100 times better than Diebold $ company managed.

The only difficult parts really are figuring out a reliable paper trail, and how to detect tampering. They could probably go hand in hand. Diebold & co failed at both anyway.

The problem is the people with the money (OUR money, aka the local Governments) for some reason did no more than a minimal amount of Quality Assurance. In most every municipality, and absolutely every state, there are a number of people who already work for the government who had to knowledge to do basic security testing. Most all of those people would also know how to get a system hardened, even if they couldn't do it themselves. NONE of these people were used to check the systems, and so in a lot of cases you ended up with $500 kiosk machines with $200 software on them being sold for $10k each.

The problem was local governments trying to be hip after the 2000 election and allowed "We don't want another Florida" to be their excuse for complete incompetance in comissioning these systems.

Like my contract management professor usded to tell us: Quality Control is the responsibility of the Vendor, Quality Assurance is the responsibility of the Customer. QC is making sure it's right, QA is not accepting it if it is wrong. The electronic voting vendors may be the actual dirty slimeballs, but it's our local governments who have let us down.

are you kidding?

[circletimessquare]

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