E-voting machines to be scrapped

Welfarite said:
Apparently not as much saved per annum as that. According to RTE:
"The cost of storing the electronic voting machinery was €489,000 in 2007, compared to €706,000 in 2006."
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That still seems like alot for storage.
According to the [broken link removed] "more than 700" machines were ordered. looking at the picture here 10-20,000 sq ft should be enough to store the entire lot. Where were they keeping them, grafton st.???
 
Bidding has started at €1 : [broken link removed]

Here is the text, before it gets removed.
Hello again, this is Brian Lenihan, Minister for Finance for the Irish government!

A few years ago, we bought some e-voting machines, with a view to doing away with our annoyingly transparent system of voting here in Ireland. Recently we commissioned a special team of highly specialised and even more highly paid consultants and dispatched them to Zimbabwe, with a view to studying the system of voting that has been developed by Robert Mugabe and on this basis, advising us how to best elect a government every 4-5 years.

Our team of exceptionally qualified and experienced specialists came back from Zimbabwe and advised us to buy these e-voting machines immediately at a cost to us of 51 Million Euro, but unfortunately we bought too many of them, and we now have stock that is surplus to our requirements. We cannot recommend this technology enough.

These "like new" machines have hardly been used and can be yours at a price you can easily afford. Just give us a call and make us an offer and we will dispatch these items immediately.
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Towger said:
It was always stated that it uses MS Access, which is the front end graphical tool/design environment. Not JET which is the database engine used by Access.
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Stated by who?

See


Ø Borland Delphi 5. A widely used compiler for creating Microsoft Windows applications. This compiler uses Object Pascal as its programming language. The compiler delivers stand alone executable applications for speed and simplicity of installation.
Ø Opus DirectAccess provides Delphi programs with a comprehensive, efficient interface to Microsoft Access databases. It replaces Delphi's normal database interface (BDE) with a much leaner intermediate layer that talks directly to the native Access database engine (DAO).
Ø TurboPower’s Async Professional is a collection of native Visual Component Library (VCL) components that provide serial communication facilities for programs created with Borland Delphi. It provides optimised components that are fully integrated with Delphi and compile directly into EXE files. Async Professional provides a wide range of serial communication components ranging from a simple COM port component, which is used to control the serial port hardware, to Voice Processing software.
Ø MULTILIZER® Developer Edition ("Multilizer") is a software globalization solution for developers of numerous programming environments. It provides the IES with the ability to target users of many different languages without the need to develop separate software solutions for each language.
2.2.3 Database used by the system
The IES uses Microsoft Access for storing the votes. Microsoft Access is a 32-bit Desktop Relational Database. It was first released in 1992 and has had several iterations up to the latest version Microsoft Access XP. The IES application is compatible with all versions of Access from Access 97 onwards. This database gives IES the ability to operate independently of other computer systems for the election process.
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​
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I heard on the radio today that the machines have a life span of about 20 years and that some of the storage contracts signed were for 25 years! :rolleyes:

Good or what??!!
 
Complainer said:
Stated by who?

See
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The document you just quoted! It seems to confuse MS Access which is a database's GUI front end, DAO (Data Access Objects) which along with RDO, ODBC and various ADOs were/are MS flavour of the day database interface layers.
 
Towger said:
The document you just quoted! It seems to confuse MS Access which is a database's GUI front end, DAO (Data Access Objects) which along with RDO, ODBC and various ADOs were/are MS flavour of the day database interface layers.
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The only thing that is confusing is your apparent reluctance to be big enough to admit that you were wrong. You stated yesterdaythat "real killer was the fact that the counting software, apart from having bugs was written in Microsoft Access". As I told you yesterday, and as is confirmed by the DoEHLG document, it wasn't written in Access. It was written in Object Pascal, and uses various add-in utilities to access the Access database.

You can try to confuse and obfuscate by introducing a pile of TLAs (three letter abbreviations), but it isn't going to work. The count software wasn't written in MS Access.
 
Complainer said:
The only thing that is confusing is your apparent reluctance to be big enough to admit that you were wrong. You stated yesterdaythat "real killer was the fact that the counting software, apart from having bugs was written in Microsoft Access". As I told you yesterday, and as is confirmed by the DoEHLG document, it wasn't written in Access. It was written in Object Pascal, and uses various add-in utilities to access the Access database.

You can try to confuse and obfuscate by introducing a pile of TLAs (three letter abbreviations), but it isn't going to work. The count software wasn't written in MS Access.
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The fact it used MS Access was what stood out in my memory. It is stated in the report MS Accress was used, but reading it in more detail seems to imply it did not use MS Accress, but rather a Delphi front end accessing the JET Database Engine through an DAO interface.

In any event the killer was that fact that they specified machines without printers and it was not ecomic to retrofit them.
 
Towger said:
In any event the killer was that fact that they specified machines without printers and it was not ecomic to retrofit them.
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I'd go further than that, to be honest. THe absence of printers was a symptom rather than a cause.

The real killer was the absence of any business case. There was understanding of what benefit(s) the new system was supposed to achieve. It was clear case of a solution looking for a problem, computerisation for its own sake.
 
Complainer said:
I'd go further than that, to be honest. THe absence of printers was a symptom rather than a cause.

The real killer was the absence of any business case. There was understanding of what benefit(s) the new system was supposed to achieve. It was clear case of a solution looking for a problem, computerisation for its own sake.
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For sure. When asked many moons ago for just such a business case Martin Cullen stated that the e-voting machines would be an efficient cost, saving measure. Asked to put a figure on that saving he estimated a saving of about €1M a year. I'm not sure if that included the additional cost of storage of the devices but let's be generous and say it does.

So the government was looking at fifty years before they broke even on the venture, from machines that were slated to last no more than twenty years.

Amazingly, in the catalogue of stupid, wasteful government decisions this isn't the worst!
 
room305 said:
For sure. When asked many moons ago for just such a business case Martin Cullen stated that the e-voting machines would be an efficient cost, saving measure. Asked to put a figure on that saving he estimated a saving of about €1M a year. I'm not sure if that included the additional cost of storage of the devices but let's be generous and say it does.

So the government was looking at fifty years before they broke even on the venture, from machines that were slated to last no more than twenty years.
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I don't believe there was any basis for his claim that they would save €1m per annum.
 
mathepac said:
Ahh, a sign of the times perhaps. AFAIK, methodology is a study / analysis of methods / practices used in a discipline.
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Ah now!! it's also "a particular procedure or set of procedures" as in a software develpment procedure perhaps? :)
 
Complainer said:
I don't believe there was any basis for his claim that they would save €1m per annum.
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It certainly had the air of a figure plucked from the air in the interview if I recall correctly. Which makes it worse, as he clearly saw nothing fundamentally wrong with spending €50M in order to achieve a €1M a year saving for twenty years.
 
He conveniently forgot to add in the extra cost of the dedicated operator that each of the 7,000 machines required on polling day - 7,000 extra man-days for each election.
 
Why you can bank online but not vote is beyond me.

Manually counting votes is the stuff of dark ages.
With PPS/Public Services Broker/ etc - eletronic voting should happen again.
 
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