As long last... €51m e-voting machines to be disposed of

Imperator said:

Other countries (such as Finland if I'm not mistaken) use electronic voting systems. I don't recall that there is an issue with those systems per se. The electronic voting system that was used in Ireland was heavily criticised during its design phase by the Irish Computing Society. They said that there was no proper design specification issued for the equipment in the first case. In addition, they called for a paper-based auditing system (which wasn't included?). I can't find the link for this at the moment but this was back in 2004. It is possible to have electronic voting - but the original decision and specification was rushed through.

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The system bought for Ireland was indeed a pile of poo. I'm not sure how the systems work in other countries, but certainly the absence of a voter verifiable audit trail is a fatal flaw. The conflicting requirements of anonymity and traceability cannot be satisfied without a paper trail.

DB74 said:

Thanks for that link - very interesting. I actually e-voted in Meath in 2002.

How do we know that the errors are due to the machines though rather than errors by the presiding officers?

Manual recounts often change the vote tallies but people seem to accept that human errors can occur.

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Of course, we don't know the cause of the errors. If we knew what had caused them, they wouldn't be errors.

There are often small variations in recounts, due to manual errors. In the cases where the extent of these errors are significant, whatever time and resources are required are provided to ensure an accurate count.

Electronic counting of votes is the easy part. The difficult bit is to ensure and guarantee in a verifiable way that the vote entered by the voter is what is recorded on the system.

Slash said:

Yes, but i do not trust Fianna Fail so am quite content to continue with the paper based system even if it means waiting a couple of days for the result.

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Good point. I'd go as far as saying I do not trust politicians and when they start tampering with the voting system you need to be extremely worried.

Complainer said:

How do you know?

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I'd like to know this too. I remember seeing a program on RTE about the machines and they had IT experts look at them and they found serious flaws. The same program looked at Dutch e-voting machines (made by the same company that made the Irish ones) that were "securely" stored. It took a couple of IT and electronic guys very little effort to break into the storage facility and change the components to cause a certain outcome.

Complainer said:

The PC Count application crashed during the count.

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The "PC Count application" = Microsoft Access 97

Towger said:

The "PC Count application" = Microsoft Access 97

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Just to clarify, it was indeed an MS Access database, but the count application was in fact written in some OO language, and used the Jet engine to access the database.