7,000 Irish e-Voting Machines To Be Scrapped

lampsie writes "You may recall from back in January 2012 that the Irish government had deemed their stock of 7,000 e-voting machines 'worthless.' Turns out they are not — after spending upwards of €54 million purchasing them almost a decade ago, all 7,000 will now be scrapped for €70,000 (just over nine Euros each). The machines were scrapped because 'they could not be guaranteed to be safe from tampering [...] and they could not produce a printout so that votes/results could be double-checked.'"

Comments

Re:use the same system for slot machines

[rtfa-troll]

Nobody actually knows how hard this is since nobody has ever actually succeeded in doing it, despite the fact that many people have tried. Here is another example:

use the same system for slot machines they go under lots of testing to make them hard to cheat them even to the point of shocking them.

This is one of the standard examples, the other given is bank machines. The average engineer/computer scientest will tell you this every time up to the stage of actually starting voting machine companies and spending millions on delivering machines which fail to be sufficiently secure. Just think about how much more hostile the voting machine environment

• if you cheat a slot machine you can get a few hundred dollars - if you beat a voting machine you can controll F22 contracts worth US$66.7 billion
• slot machines are run in an environemnt where you can watch the users - watching voters is illegal
• you can see who wins on your slot machine and almost nobody cares - voters are supposed to be anonymous
• slot machines are essentially static; the money is put in and taken out in the bar - voting machines have to be distributed to many locations
• your slot machine will still earn money even if it is completely emptied several times a year - a voting machine only needs to lose once

It's true that the slot Las Vegas slot machine program is much better than any current voting machine goes through. That is outrageous. However, don't think that if you did follow the Las Vegas system that would be enough.