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


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.

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.
 
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.
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.

How do you know?

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.