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

STV

[TheRaven64]

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.

Re:STV

[mosiadh]

Well that's not entirely true. Most elections in Ireland work on a basis of there being more than one representitive per electoral area. The actual amount of votes to be elected on the first count is the quota based on the number of votes cast and the number of seats available. If no one makes the quota, the votes are counted in successive rounds until the quota is reached or enough canidates have been eliminated.

Re:STV

[dmartin]

Arrow's impossibility theorem proves that no voting system can simultaneously satisfy all five of his requirements in a system with more than two choices *for arbitrary input*.

That does not mean that one cannot be better than the others, or even the best. For example, a simple system may satisfy all 5 criteria for 65% of possible inputs. Another system may satisfy it for 75% of all possible inputs. Note that all the votes of a single election are one single "input", not each vote. What we are looking at what fraction of possible ways of voting are "fair".

If we weigh all inputs equally (and this is an assumption, because one may choose to argue that certain combinations are more likely than others) then the second system is better. Arrow's impossiblility theorem only tells you that the goal of getting a fair election for an arbitrary election, or 100% of possible inputs, is impossible.

Re:STV

[Helvick]

The Irish STV implementation also has to redistribute so called "surplus" votes.

Since it features multiple candidate constituencies the amount of votes required to get elected is not a simple majority but a quota defined by the Droop formula (Total number of valid ballots/(Total number of candidates +1))+1. Ballots for candidates who exceed the quota have a surplus and that surplus gets redistributed according to the next preference on the ballot. The exact mechanism for choosing the actual votes that comprise the surplus amount is random and those randomly selected votes are then transferred as full votes to the next preference candidate. So when a candidate has 10000 votes with a quota of 8500, 1500 ballots are chosen at random and the preferences in those ballots are used to transfer them to the remaining candidates in play. For situations where a candidate gets a surplus on a second count (ie including transferred preferences from an eliminated candidate or from surplus votes from an earlier elected candidate) only the ballots transferred at the last stage are used when selecting the surplus votes to be transferred.

These shortcuts were introduced to speed up manual paper counts but they meant that the task of comparing an electronic count to a paper Voter Verified Audit Trail (VVAT) presents an interesting problem. In order to be able to fully and accurately validate the electronic count the VVAT records would have to be able to be tied exactly to the sequence of the electronic votes (so that each electronic record could be tied to each paper record and the random selections for surplus redistributions could be matched up). One solution to this would be to remove the shortcuts for electronic voting but that would have meant moving to e-Voting entirely as they could not use two different counting methods in different constituencies. So they had to implement an e-Voting STV counting mechanism that followed the same rules as a paper count would. Not hard to do but this then led to a further issue for those of us arguing for a voter verified audit trail for any e-voting system.

One of the Irish Government's least silly arguments against any VVAT for e-Voting was that such a capability might be compromised and could result in someone figuring out exactly how (some) individual voters had voted. Since the Irish constitution explicitly specifies that parliamentary voting must be secret this was something they were very much afraid of - it's notable that since the constitution does not explicitly require counting votes to be accurate (it only implies this) they were less concerned about that. Anyway that's how it seemed to me when I met them about the issue - they didn't say it as bluntly as that but they were terrified about the potential secrecy problems but only worried about the potential for "small" errors.

The real problems with the Irish e-Voting debacle had very little to do with the complexities of an STV count - they were the same as they were\are in most other counties though. The machines in question were provided by private companies, closed and not adequately tested by properly independent security professionals, the vote tabulation software was also closed, similarly unavailable for inspection by independent specialists and most worryingly it was never available any significant period of time ahead of any given election as it had to be rewritten for each count. The lack of a voter verified paper audit capability (which could have been implemented safely despite the concerns described above) meant that the systems could be attacked\compromised\fail in ways that could materially affect an election without being detected. In the end though few of those problems led to the current Government's decision to abandon the problem, they finally got fed up with the political and financial costs associated with fighting to keep the project alive and they gave up. I'm pretty sure that many of the Government Ministers and civil servants involved still think that the Nedap\Powervote e-Voting system was perfectly fine.

Re:STV

[CarpetShark]

I am in favour of anything that would break the current logjam.

Have you considered a beaver?

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: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.

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

Re:Not suprising

[kpainter]

Their appears to be a lot of more Irish racism then i would of suspected. I wounder why that is.

Would that be racism as in "I'll race you to the pub"?
Lighten up. And yes, I am Irish.

Re:"Change Vote To Republican" not the same there

[Altima(BoB)]

Actually, even though the parent may be intended as an IRA joke, Fianna FaÃl, the current ruling party (whose failed policies have made Ireland perhaps nation worst hit by the global downturn, and who were responsible for buying all these voting machines in the first place), refer to themselves as "The Republican Party."

Though yes it refers to a different political and historical movement than the G.O.P. in the US, Fianna FaÃl have been ruling long enough with terrible enough policies and arrogance that I would consider the two analogous.