Irish Reject E-Voting, Go Back To Paper 154
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.
electronic voting why the rush? (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless it can reduce costs, why the rush to electronic voting in most of the world? Our election systems all appear to have built-in schedule to take into account how long it takes to tally the votes. In the US we vote in November and really have a few weeks before we need to know the results. (the president-elect needs to setup his/her office and prepare for the transition, which is why it's not more like several weeks of time)
And if you do use e-voting, why can't anyone do something cool with it? Like support anonymous voting, or public-private key systems for signed and authenticated voting.
This is good news. (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm glad to see they are staying with paper voting. I think that our society is not yet ready for important documents to exist solely digitally. Our governments and companies have not demonstrated the security necessary to keep them fully secure. Also, much of our society (especially the older ones) does not yet have the facility to use new electronic devices reliably
And kudos to the public officials that actually have the balls to scrap these voting systems they have invested heavily in to ensure a more trustworthy vote. Of course, better planning could have avoided the investment entirely, but lawyers (err, I mean governments) have never been good at long-term or large-scale project management.
Re:STV (Score:2, Insightful)
It doesn't sound like it adds that much difficulty. After the first round, you know how many ballots you have, so you know how many ballots you need for a winner. If you don't have a winner, you take the smallest pile and distribute those votes into new piles (I mean, I would use math, but I suppose you could re-count every single ballot), so as a practical matter, I doubt that more than ~30% of the ballots get looked at more than once (I wonder if they publish such a thing?).
Re:eVoting Premature (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Fiddler (Score:2, Insightful)
are you kidding? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:STV (Score:1, Insightful)
And they CAN manage with paper voting!
There is nothing wasteful about the intense man-hours of manually reading each vote when your Democracy is at stake.
Re:electronic voting why the rush? (Score:3, Insightful)
The fundamental problem with all electronic/cryptographic voting systems is lack of transparency. Any reasonably intelligent person can fully understand the paper system and can, with sufficient motivation, verify an election. As soon as you introduce electronics and/or cryptography you are forced to entrust the election to experts.
Re:STV (Score:2, Insightful)
These machines were bought in by a minister with a record for failed projects and ruining departments he was in charge of. There was no debating it in the Dáil (Irish parliament) and it was a rushed purchase. The secure storage that the machines were kept in cost E528,000 last year and there's a 25 year contract on that!
The best part of this so far is, "Mr Gormley announced his decision at University College Cork yesterday, saying the cost of adapting the machines to make election results verifiable would come to 28 million, a sum which could not be justified in the current economic climate." That E28m could buy a lot of paper, pens, stamps and man hours to check the results.
Re:silly (Score:3, Insightful)
well the local paper reports over 50 million euro spent on the 7,500 machines since 2002 and they have gone unused in 5 years and 3.5 million is spent per year to keep them in a storage facility in meath
Minister Gormley 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"
Or to put it simply they cost too much and ireland really can't justify spending any more on the things what with rising unemployment and less revenue from tax.
It's not a problem with voting electronically, but the cost of electronic voting.
Re:STV (Score:3, Insightful)
Balls
Say there are three choices for society, call them A, B, and C. Suppose first that everyone prefers option B the least. That is, everyone prefers every other option to B. By unanimity, society must prefer every option to B. Specifically, society prefers A and C to B. Call this situation Profile 1.
On the other hand, if everyone preferred B to everything else, then society would have to prefer B to everything else by unanimity. So it is clear that, if we take Profile 1 and, running through the members in the society in some arbitrary but specific order, move B from the bottom of each person's preference list to the top, there must be some point at which B moves off the bottom of society's preferences as well, since we know it eventually ends up at the top.
It's an intellectual argument that takes a fluid dynamic and focuses on a theoretical point in a transition. Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't this just say that "in a major upheaval there will be a point where one person makes the first move"?
I'm open to arguments as to why this isn't tripe but, to me, it reads like a psychologist trying to sound scientific (psychologists think scientific means confusing).
Re:eVoting Premature (Score:1, Insightful)
I believe that the e-voting machines are deliberately insecure so as to undermine democracy. Like you said: it's not hard to make these systems more secure.
Re:eVoting Premature (Score:2, Insightful)