The Electronic Voting Farce Continues
November 8th, 2006
With the midterm elections in the US in full swing, all eyes (well… some eyes) are once again on the shambles of e-voting as it buckles and crashes - as expected. RTE mentions “problems with electronic voting machines in a number of states, including Ohio, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania and Florida”. I expect we’ll be hearing more about that, since the recent US elections have been plagued by discrepencies in the e-voting system. Start with Ohio 2004, and work your way back to the Volusia County fiasco in 2000 - the Florida constituency with such strong support for Bush that Al Gore actually ended up with fewer than -16,000 votes. These were the high profile cases, the issues that came to light - but always remember the words of a wise hotel cook from Torquay: “what the eye can’t see, the chef gets away with”.
Update via Slashdot: The candidate who allegedly got 0 votes.
On this side of the Atlantic, we have a different system. The Irish government put €40million into the Nedap-Powervote, which, as any computing student would have told you, is not secure. This was confirmed in a demonstration (linked to by ICTE last month) by some hackers who reverse-engineered the Dutch electronic voting system, which is almost identical to our own (except ours has a thick layer of dust on top).
As we become accustomed to the security failures and general inconsistencies in the electronic voting systems in other countries, there is a danger that the Irish public will forgive the faults in our own. Consider the informative website that the government has given us to ease our concerns - electronicvoting.ie. It does its best to reassure us ignorant members of the public, urging us to disregard those ridiculous experts and nonsensical independent audits:
The Nedap-Powervote system has already been proven in the Netherlands over the past 15 years and in a number of cities in Germany and France.
I would have worded that slightly differently. Maybe more along the lines of “The Nedap-Powervote system has already been proven to be insecure in the Netherlands”. The fact that they are still using it is completely beside the point - there’s no need for us to turn a blind eye just because our neighbours are.
But we can overlook those minor details such as accuracy, as long as its nice from a usability perspective -
It has been adapted, improved, tested and successfully piloted at two polls in Ireland. To date, over 400,000 Irish people have used the system in real polls, and their response has been overwhelmingly positive.
Daniel from Kildare reported that it was overwhelmingly nice to push a button instead of ticking a box. Margaret from Leitrim was also overwhelmed by her button-pushing experience. With results like this, who needs the accuracy? Its just a shame we spent so much on the Nedap-Powervote - I hear Fisher Price have a system that lights up.
I actually don’t have a major problem with e-voting, because to be honest I don’t really care who gets elected. However, I don’t like being force-fed blatant lies at the same time. This website is provided by the government and thus should give us a fair and accurate overview of electronic voting, rather than peddling half-truths in a marketing brochure. It should have been taken down the day the Commission on Electronic Voting pointed out that the system is no good, and that we’d hold off for another few years. But the government decided to leave the website there, because whats the harm in a few inconsistencies? It sounds to me like they’re setting a precedent.
del.icio.us
digg it
April 25th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
[…] Bertie is happy to pile on regardless and deploy an insecure voting system, simply because his buddies abroad are doing it. Perhaps if he were less concerned in keeping up appearences, and more interested in the integrity of our elections, then he would acknowledge that the millions wasted on our unused voting system can only be blamed on the government who forked out on a product that does not work. […]