Ireland Rejects E-Voting for Upcoming Elections

colmmacc writes "Following months of lobbying by groups such as Irish Citizens for Trustworthy Evoting and a damning and comprehensive report by Ireland's Commission on Electronic Voting, the Irish Minister for the Environment has bowed to pressure and conceded that the system has not been proven safe and has decided not to use Evoting for the forthcoming elections on June 11th.. This is a very welcome move following 6 months of indignation on the part of the Minister and refusals to meet with concerned groups."

A shame

[mcx101]

We only just got the evoting system in Ireland and used it in the last election. It seems a shame to scrap it now. It's much faster and surely more accurate than counting by hand.

Maybe all the lobbyists are the same people who lost their jobs as ballot counters ;-)

Woohoo! Yes!

[Darkman, Walkin Dude]

This is great, I wrote a couple of articles in the newspapers about it myself here... Thank god is all I can say. I have nothing against modernisation of voting systems, but there has to be some kind of accountability, and the government was going ahead without either a paper trail or a poll...

Hopefully we'll see a little more open source code too...

Re:A shame

[DrMindWarp]

We only just got the evoting system in Ireland and used it in the last election. It seems a shame to scrap it now. It's much faster and surely more accurate than counting by hand

The system was only piloted in a few areas during the last election and even those pilots were flawed.

You should read the report before making any comments about the accuracy of the count. If the Commission don't think it is accurate, how can you suggest it is ?

Without VVAT there is no known accuracy.

Victory!!!

[Pablo El Vagabundo]

I emailed the minister about this ages ago. I wanted a paper trail for this new e-voting system he was introducing. Some of the Irish ministers are great an will email you personnally.

Dear ould Martin, however, got a lackey to email me a ref number. That was the last I heard.

Serves him right!! This is a good thing for e-voting. Maybe they will address the concerns and implement a safe,secure system (that allows us to spoil our votes).

Pablo El Vagabyundo

Re:Open Source?

[lollipop17]

Yeah, I saw the story also on rte [www.rte.ie] where I get most of my irish news anyway (cos they don't have nasty registration and such) but decided to post the link as they have to link to related earlier stories on the subject that might prove useful.

This was my favorite part of the story: "The Fine Gael Spokesman on the Environment, Bernard Allen, claimed Minister Cullen had tampered with the very essence of democracy and had wasted taxpayers' money.
Mr Cullen rejected the claims but said today had not been a great day for him. "

Re:interesting

[MindStalker]

Yes, but in the US voting is supposed to be anonymous. Meaning you could have the most controlling evil demended spouce in the world, and go vote for X and tell them that you voted for Y. With internet voting they can sit down with you and force you to vote for X. Of course this would be true of labor orginizations, many clubs, any any group that someone might belong to that would influence presure weither it be physical or mential pressure to vote the way they wanted.

Solution in search of a problem?

[YankeeInExile]

I still assert that for the most part e-voting is a solution in search of a problem.

While there were serious discrepancies in Florida in the US 2000 Presidential Election[1], the solution to that problem is to go to a fundamentally simpler system, not one wrought with complexity.

Everyone agrees that election systems have to be accurate, tamper-proof, easy to use for both voters and polling-place officials, accessible to all voters (including the blind), and auditable. Those requirements are tough to meet, but an additional requirement is the killer: anonymity. A recorded ballot cannot be traced back to an individual voter, nor can a voter be able to use a ballot to obtain payment for a vote. Says David Dill, a Stanford computer scientist: "Unlike almost any other application, voting systems must discard critical information."

1: Do not think for one minute they were partisan - I think it was just luck of the draw that Gore lost - and had the results been the opposite, we would have heard precisely the same level of whining from the Republican camp that we heard from the Democrats.

Re:E-voting

[JosKarith]

>1)Unbelievably simple to use
A UI consisting of a simple form displayed on a touchscreen, with a confirm/deny when a choice is made. Not too hard.
2)COMPLETELY secure
Physical security. No connection to other devices/internet. Stored data encrypted with a _different key_ for each machine so that if one is stolen the whole system isn't compromised.
3)Leaves a completely correct and permanent trail for recounting
Okay, this is the potential toughie. One possible solution is for an internally stored secondary backup device - hell it might even be a paper printout. Either that or a receipt of voting given to each voter though there might be fun and games collecting those for a recount ;>
4)Relatively cheap to roll out
Have you seen governmental budget figures recently? Cheap is not an issue.
Actually the biggest hurdle is that of voter authentification - without a universal ID system then checking would be...problematic to say the least.
But that's a whole new can of worms I'm not going into here.

Re:E-voting

[siriuskase]

The more "security" features are incorporated, the less secure I feel. I used the butterfly system for decades, I felt secure. It's hard to move or remove a hole. The collating process is understandable. And, if necessary, the punch cards can be read with the human eye.

Any algorithm that requires a phd in encryption science to understand will be unverifiable by the typical voter. If the mechanics of the system are not transparent, we will be handing over the cornerstone of our political system to an unelectable group, not chosen for their honesty. I know that encrpytion geeks are probably the most trustworthy people in the world, but even they have a price and a political bias. I'd rather see a simple system made simpler. I'd rather see public money spent on studying the biases of the butterfly and other simple sytems rather than development of whizzy new sytems that can't be explained with concepts understood by most qualified voters.

It doesn't matter how fair it is if the system requires faith in unknown technology and the people behind it.. If the ballot is badly organized, reorganize it. Fix only the problem, why replace the whole system?

Re:E-voting

[perelgut]

The reason you don't see "Right, let's stop pissing about and actually make something..." is two-fold.

First, there's the highly public nature of this beast - it has to be perfect and yet all forces combine to try and force it out at the earliest opportunity. And missing the earliest date is treated as a sign of systemic failure. In this case from Ireland, nobody says there are problems, just that there isn't enough evidence to convince the reviewers to a suitable degree of confidence that there won't be problems.

Second, the liabilities in this sort of product probably exceed anything you might imagine. I doubt that the profitability comes anywhere near the liability.

You'd be better off trying to come up with an e-voting system that is secure, unspoofable and that allows people to select their "Idol" or to vote someone "off the island".

Quick background

[aecolley]

The system proposed for use in Ireland and dismissed by the Commission's report today is the Nedap/Powervote system, variants of which are used in the Netherlands and parts of Germany. It's a kiosk-based DRE system which uses glorified memory sticks to store ballot records. It was developed in apparent ignorance of the voter-verification requirement [notablesoftware.com].

Because the developers used the waterfall method, and didn't find out about the audit requirement until customer acceptance testing, they baulked at the idea of going back to the drawing board, and instead bolted on a useless printout-of-ballot-module-contents facility, and called it an audit trail.

Their salesmen are very good, and the Irish Government agreed to buy the system (total cost over 40 million euros) at the height of the Florida debacle in late 2000. Since then there have been reports, objections, and all manner of outcry from IT professionals in Ireland. Even the entire Opposition (elected politicians not belonging to the ruling coalition) opposed the system. The Government maintained a constant mantra: the system is accurate, the system is thoroughly tested, you're all a bunch of Luddites for thinking differently. Eventually the Irish Computer Society joined in [www.ics.ie], and the Minister promptly accused them [www.iol.ie] of being a front for the anti-globalisation movement.

The writing then being on the wall, the Government then appointed an independent Commission to examine the system and its testing, hoping for a graceful way out of the political corner. The Commission's report, however, is rather more damning than they hoped. In my personal opinion, this has more than a little to do with the fact that noted software expert David Parnas assisted the Commission, and he's a good deal more methodical and careful than Nedap/Powervote seem to have been.

--Adrian.

Re:E-voting

[Pxtl]

Receipt is risky. If you give a person a receipt, then their spouse can beat them for voting for the wrong person. Better would be to write a generated "confirmation" number for each party and the user can jot down the number they actually voted for. The dummy confirmation numbers are actually the true number of a previous voter, so when the confirmation numbers and votes become public (to allow personal auditing) then a "fake" number that one gave to their spouse/boss/otherwise oppressor will appear as a valid vote. The only trick would be the possibility of recieving multiple of the same confirmation numbers.

Thus, if anyone notes that their personal (true) number does not match with the number in the database, they can push for a recount. Yes, they have no proof, but if enough people complained then a paper recount could be called. Proof, after all, is risky - it damages the anonymity of the vote process. By allowing the user to create false proof, we let them conceal their vote, but confirm, personally, that their vote was registered.

The system also prints out a ballot that goes into a conventional box, for the recount system. The user gets to watch this happen, and may physically place the paper ballot into the box themselves. Thus, we gain the advantages of the traditional system: allowance for the paper trail.