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7000 e-Voting Machines Now Deemed Worthless By Irish Government
First time accepted submitter lampsie writes "Despite spending at least 51 million euro over the last decade buying and storing 7000 e-voting machines from Dutch firm Nedap, the Irish Finance minister has announced that they are now 'worthless'. The machines were originally trialled in 2002 on three regional elections, but a nationwide rollout in 2004 was put on hold after a confidential report expressed serious concern over the security of the voting machines. According to the report, the integrity of the ballot could not be guaranteed with the equipment and controls used. Several years on, and tens of millions later, it looks like the pen and paper ballot will remain for now."
"the Irish Finance minister has announced that they are now 'worthless'. ... after a confidential report expressed serious concern over the security of the voting machines. ... the integrity of the ballot could not be guaranteed"
Come on, Ireland, where's your sense of tenacity? On this side of the pond we have shown over and over again that voting machines are insecure -- we even had a CEO of one of the voting machine companies promise to deliver his home state of Ohio to to GWB, then had a precinct in Ohio that was using his machines report more votes in favor of GWB than the number of people in the precinct -- and we are still using them.
You can't let a little thing like "failing to provide an accurate and trustworthy tally of votes" keep you from insisting that voting machines provide an accurate and trustworthy tally of votes. There are corporate profits and lobbying money to consider. Are you going to ignore the will of the lobbyists who represent the voting machine companies just because they stand directly opposed to the best interests of the nation? You would not last a second in American politics.
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Optical scanning technology != "e-voting machine"; it's a paper ballot that's simply tabulated by a machine. It's no different than the bubble tests that you took in school. If you doubt the results of the machine you are free to volunteer your time to manually count each and every ballot. As I said, they are available for inspection by any interested party.
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We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t206/DynOmni/CanadianBallot.jpg
That's the canadian ballot. Very simple. It is counted by hand. Takes a few hours. You can't stuff the ballot box and it is verifiable. No "do overs".
Maybe because we don't vote on useless propositions, that we don't need 100 page ballots. And if there are other elections at same time, there are multiple ballots that are put in multiple ballot boxes. It's rather quite simple.
I have been in many election in france with even *bigger* number of voters. And we had all vote counted in 30-40 minutes. Why ? Because they simply knew participation and numbers, and then simply asked for volunteer to stay longer and help the democratic process. Then they gave ~70-80 stapple of paper vote to a table of 4 volunteer. 2 to count, to to observe, then reverse. There were about 8 table at last election, then those who finish counting earlier get another staples. That is also why big circumscription also do get to vote in big meeting room or similar big room. It is not to give voter privacy, but because once the vote is finished by whatever hour/time they will put a lot of table for the volunteer to count. I have participated in a lot of such a count. It works well and is quick. By the way once they have enough volunteer additional persons are welcome to stay and look as long as they do not disturb the counter..
I have to wonder how it comes you could not come up with such a solution to ask for unpaid volunteer among voters, and would rather rely on a few persons counting.
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And that's the reason why American views on this story are not very valid. Ireland, like most of the world, have ballots with a single choice. The USA is unusual in having such complicated elections.
As has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, Americans generally vote for more than one race at the same election. It's not a matter of figuring out which stack to put the ballot in, but of tabulating the responses from each of 10-20 choices. Apparently we're somewhat unique in that.
The software activates itself an hour before the elections begin, and it must be closed at most a couple of hours after the election ends, or the booth is invalidated. It stores only two information: if an registered elector voted, and the vote itself, but no link is made between information. Data itself is encrypted and only the Superior Electoral Court President Judge has the key, which is he/she hands off to the Regional Judges only after all booths are recovered to the regional courts.
The whole thing is very straightforward, but the process has many control points and locks, so it would require an army of fraudsters for the elections to be cheated.
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I believe the Irish system is similar to the English, Canadian, Australian, etc. system. In a federal election, a member of parliament is elected. The leader of the party with the most representatives is the prime minister. The leader of the party with the second-most is the leader of the opposition. Dog catchers are not elected, local elections are held separately, and if a national referendum is to be carried out, then that is a separate event too. Which other elected offices were you thinking about?
I can't speak for ireland but in the UK we elect
MPs every 4-5 years (it's up to parliment when to call an election with a limit of 5 years between elections)
Councillers every year (normally one third of the council is replaced each time)
MEPs every 5 years
Some places also have an elected mayor and there are also occasional refferendums (either local or national)
Sometimes more than one thing is decided at the same time but when it is there are seperate ballot papers for each. IIRC there are seperate ballot boxes too.
Propositions are completely alien to us as is the idea of electing judges and minor government posts.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I believe in Ireland they have the Single Transferable Vote, a system where the voter marks candidates in order of preference. So a cross is replaced by 1, 2, 3 etc. This means that a ballot paper is potentially revisited many times, as candidates are eliminated and lower preferences are counted. Such a system ought to be better with electronic voting, except for the security problems.
The amazing thing is it ever got as far as it did. Politicians of all people should be able to grasp the importance of fair and transparent elections. If a machine can be tampered with in an undetectable way then there is a huge incentive for people to do it. If a store can print out a slip of paper when I buy a chocolate bar then there is absolutely no excuse that a voting machine cannot do likewise.