Why don't we have electronic voting?

[NoRegretsCoyote]

I have never once been asked for ID at a polling station once i have my voting card that is posted out, which is surely far more insecure than any electronic system.

Sure in odd cases you can get hold of someone else's polling card and vote twice. The issue is that this kind of fraud would tend to cancel out.

It is very hard to systematically rig the current system in a way that would bias the results.

You could, in theory at least, rig an electronic voting machine to bias the votes in favour of a particular candidate.

 

[TarfHead]

This was not an issue 2 weeks ago. The number of candidates in the EU constituencies was an issue this time around. Maybe set a higher value on the deposit to be paid to deter some of the Independents, limit political parties to one candidate per constituency. Those two have obvious weaknesses as suggestions, but electronic voting raises multiple ones.

 

[PMU]

Under what I said it's still a secret ballot. It's a printed record of what a voter who turned up at the polling station decided. No identifying mark is on it, but allows for checking.

Without getting too much into the tech side, this is exactly one of the problems the CH e-voting system ran into. The votes were shuffled to prevent voter identification and an issue arose in the subsequent verifiability that the list corresponded to the votes cast, so vote manipulation might not be detected. There's loads on the net about the CH system - the SwissPost e-voting system. One thing I note that distinguishes the CH system from the IE e-voting system is that, as far as I am aware, the IE system was based on proprietary hardware and software, whereas the CH is based on open source, so anyone can check the code and determine if it is fit for purpose. (And this is, I believe, how the problem was detected). As open source solutions would have been available in the early 2000s when the IE system was introduced, it's difficult to understand why this route was not followed.

 

[MugsGame]

As open source solutions would have been available in the early 2000s when the IE system was introduced, it's difficult to understand why this route was not followed.

Our assumption at the time was that the competent civil servants working in good faith were generalists educated about e-voting by commercial vendor lobbyists and the subsequent RFP was written under their influence. By the time they understood the theoretical e-voting issues and the practical issues with what they'd procured it had become a political football.

The Germans used a similar system in 2005 (subsequently ruled unconstitutional) so we weren't alone in making bad choices.

 

[NoRegretsCoyote]

@MugsGame

Correct. The e-voting strategy was very much driven by the minister of the day, Noel Dempsey, and not by his civil servamts.

A lot of the problems only became apparent after a lot of his political capital had been deployed.

 

[Early Riser]

This was not an issue 2 weeks ago. The number of candidates in the EU constituencies was an issue this time around. Maybe set a higher value on the deposit to be paid to deter some of the Independents, limit political parties to one candidate per constituency. Those two have obvious weaknesses as suggestions, but electronic voting raises multiple ones.

Perhaps the handiest way to cut down the number of "no hope" candidates would be to increase the number on nominations required to get on on the Register. It was only 60 for the recent EU election.