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

Paper and Electronic

[RichMan]

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).

Re:STV

[spaceyhackerlady]

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

silly

[phantomfive]

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.

Has e-voting really made the process better?

[DJRumpy]

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?

Re:Has e-voting really made the process better?

[pilsner.urquell]

Cryptographer David Chaum and some researchers from the University of Maryland-Baltimore County (UMBC), George Washington University (GWU), University of Ottawa (UO) and University of Waterloo (UW) have for several years been working on a system called Punchscan.

It is an End-to-end (E2E) cryptographic system with independent verification. The system is designed to be transparent to everyone, candidates, voters, election officials, media, courts et al.

Re:Not suprising

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Then again...

[PinkyDead]

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.

Mainly a US Republican Party PR problem

[billstewart]

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.