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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.
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).
Here in British Columbia we are having a referendum in a couple of weeks on adopting STV for provincial elections. B.C. politics have become so heavily polarized that I am in favour of anything that would break the current logjam.
We use paper ballots, and have always done so. I don't see this changing, and would oppose any moves to do so. A ballot is definitive: an actual person made marks on it, and an actual person counted it. This is as it should be.
...laura
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?
Their appears to be a lot of more Irish racism then i would of suspected. I wounder why that is.
Why on earth wouldn't you suspect a lot? I know in the US Irish immigrants were notorious for it; witness how many Irish were hired as slave overseers in the US and West Indies, since they were reliably brutal towards black slaves, or the race riots in New York during the civil war, or the frequently violent resistance of Boston Irish towards school integration. I am the descendant of Irish immigrants but I have no illusion about how racism seems to be an unfortunate characteristic of Irish culture.
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.
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
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
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.