Irish reject e-voting

The Irish have rejected e-voting. A "Commission on Electronic Voting" found that:

"...experts retained by the Commission found it very easy to bypass electronic security measures and gain complete control of the “hardened” PC, overwrite the software, and thereby in theory to gain complete control over the count in a given constituency,"

And:

"the system does not have a voter-verifiable audit trail (VVAT), argued by many to:
- reassure voters that their vote has been correctly recorded,
- create a disincentive to the manipulation of the system by providing an external check on accuracy,
- enable recovery from a serious system failure;"

The system they were evaluating is the European made Nedap/Powervote but the weaknesses identified sound awfully familiar. The 28 page report shows the standards and procedures that were applied in arriving at the decision to reject e-voting (at least for now). One of their concerns was:

"there has been no parallel testing of the system in a real election, either against the traditional manual system of voting or against an alternative electronic means; such parallel testing is very important for such a critical system as voting at elections: although the system was deployed on a pilot basis in 2002, these elections were not run in parallel with a paper ballot, and the software has been modified many times since then"

Nice idea but parallel testing won't protect you from election day hacking. They talk about access to source code which would be useful but again no guarantee that the code run on election day is the same as tested. If the machines are remotely accessible by modem, cell-phone modem or the internet all the testing in the world is meaningless.

The report is here:

http://www.cev.ie/htm/report/V02.pdf

And some related articles here:

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/front/2004/0501/213310571HM1EVOTE.html

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/30/ireland_evote/

Just like those sods not to understand who their masters really are!

:toast: (Speaking as one fairly reeking with Irish DNA)

...of shocking public scandals in recent years. Bribary of politicians, back-handers, pay-offs, dodgy land deals, off-shore bank accounts, fraud, embezzelment to do with land re-zoneing etc. Scandal after scandal after scandal. Indeed, one ex-Government Minister from the 80s was sent to jail last week for taking bribes in a planning scandal. He was the 2nd ex-member of the governemt to do time in the last 2 years over this stuff.

Irish people's cynicism and hatred of politicians is pretty close to an all time high.

AND YET...

We have a general election here in I think about 18 mths. And let me tell you this - despite all the hatred of the political establishemnt, despite ZERO trust in politicians, despite all the scandals and jailings we've had, despite the widespread disillusionment with the enire political process...

...let me tell you the number of people in this country who will think that the next election is anything other than completely free and fair: NOT ONE SINGLE SOLITARY INDIVIDUAL. NO ONE. NOT EVEN THE LOONIEST LOONEY IN THE LOONIEST LOONEY BIN WOULD CLAIM THAT. NOBODY!!!

No matter how bad things get here, the notion that an election might be anything other totally free and fairl and that every entitled person would have the opportuity to vote would be so alien as to not really register with most people.

Indeed, if you were to even mention the possibility of voter-disenfanchisement or voter suppression or voter intimidation to your average Irish voter, they'd have difficulty understanding what exactly you were talking about. The same would be true in Britain or France or Germany or any other country in Europe.

It is quite extraordinary that it is only the US where an election is so lacking in transparency that you still have citizens, months after the election, saying that it wasn't straight.

Best democracy on Earth? Don't believe the hype people. The USA isn't even the best democracy in North America.

... and the more the rest of the world rubs our noses in our hypocrisy, the better. We have nothing to be proud of on so many levels, but sleeping while our franchise was stolen and used to maintain an illegitimate, non-representative cartel in power is perhaps our worst failing.

Of course, as most Europeans believe, you can always tell an American -- you just can't tell him much. Once we stop beating our chests in false pride, maybe we can begin to hear the Nazi rats nesting in our ballot boxes. When that happens, the DU exterminators will be ready to help us take our country back. Thanks for your honest words from across the pond.

it was a Republic. There is a huge difference.

Too bad we lost the Republic.

Where is our "Commission on Electronic Voting" in America? We have nothing to stop our governments from inflicting DREs on us. The newly created Elections Assistance Commission is apparently committed to DREs and helping HAVA pay for them.

In Ireland:
"The abandonment of the new system, which has cost €50 million, is a deep embarrassment for the Government, which insisted for months that its reliability was beyond question. An initial contingency plan to carry out more pilot testing in June was scrapped quickly yesterday morning when the extent of the commission's concerns became clear."

DITTO on post above SEND THIS TO CONYERS, whose bill (good otherwise) still does not address the issues with e-voting, and in fact encourages it.

progress is being made. General awareness of election fraud is on the rise and specific analysis of how it was done and how to prove it continues.

BTW: How do I "send it to Conyers"?