Democracy under threat

national | politics / elections | opinion/analysis

Thursday February 26, 2004 00:41

by Niall Ó Brolcháin - Green Party

niallob at esatclear dot ie

Galway

091-596680

An article on e-voting by Niall Ó Brolcháin of the Galway Greens.

During the week, I attended a presentation on electronic voting in Galway County Hall. I was expecting to have some of my fears allayed. Instead I came away, feeling more suspicious than ever.

The presentation concentrated on the voting machines. I'm not terribly worried about those. My fear is what happens to the information afterwards.

Each voting machine contains a little blue cartridge. On this cartridge all the votes are stored. It is the equivalent of one of the existing ballot boxes. While it is technically possible to tamper with this cartridge, it would be just as easy to tamper with a ballot box.

The serious difficulty I have is that once all the cartridges are read into a counting machine, the counting software can alter the result either deliberately or as the result of a genuine software error.

The software is written by a Dutch company and loaded onto the various counting computers in advance of each election. I discovered that the software to be used for the forthcoming Local and European Elections is not the same software that was used for the General Election or for the Nice Treaty Referendum. In fact it has never been used in a real life situation before.

I asked what options were open to a candidate who had a difficulty with the result. The answer was that a candidate could go to court to get a printout of the votes counted. This of course would be a pointless exercise, as it would merely provide a print out of the final votes and not the votes cast. If any votes had been altered, there would be no way of knowing.

The software on the counting machines is not due to be independently verified. A small number of Dutch technicians paid by the Government are to be effectively in control of the count for the whole of Ireland. Nor will the source code of the counting software, be made available to the opposition parties. It really boils down to the old cliché, "trust us, we're the Government".

Many technical people as a way of making the system fairly safe have suggested a voter verifiable audit trail. This does make sense. It would of course not be possible to produce the precise result calculated by the electronic system. However, it would be possible to compare the votes in the audit trail (the votes cast) with the printout of the final votes. These should match exactly. If they do not then there is a serious problem.

Another question I raised was that of what happened to the information after the count. I was told that the local authorities would hold this information. It would not be available to political parties. However, when I asked if this information would be available to the Government, I could not get a straight answer. This I found to be quite worrying.

The sad thing is that an electronic system could be made very safe if certain basic safeguards could be put in place. Without these our democracy is under a real and serious threat.

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Comments (4 of 4)

Worried about losing votes?

by Canteen Kevin

Thu Feb 26, 2004 11:31

Your party colleagues in Dublin have already done that by siding with the shit (FF/PD/FG) over the Bin Tax -so don't act all surprised when your buddies want to corrupt the system even more.

"Race against Waste"? - For fucks sake

e voting

by v worried

Thu Feb 26, 2004 14:36

FF Party will almost certainly rig this election.

commercial property

by pc

Thu Feb 26, 2004 16:03

thanks for that report.....

the biggest issue that really hasn't been pointed out is that the code won't be realeased cos its commercial property as pointed out to me by others

hmm newspapers , i don't know whether to bother with them, its sometimes most interesting page in them is the letters to the editor the only place where intelligent and revealing analysis of a subject pops up

joe mccarthy wrote a good letter about his attempts to get info re code through the foi, the
department replied patronisingly saying all his request were answered to upmost ability but that meant they continued to refuse to release the code.....

as explained to me its to do with important public info and services being controlled by corporations.... i never know whether to write letters to the editor. i have done before and some have been printed,but im hesitent to think someone with far more info on this subject would write..... (that shouldn't stop me) but you don't want to make a statement without it being true.... and that would take exhaustive research....

Re: Democracy under threat. What about the existing democracy?

by Terry

Sat Feb 28, 2004 00:18

I certainly agree that the whole fiasco regarding e-voting is worrying for the integrity of our voting system and fully concur that as it stands now, it is wide open to abuse, particularly from the points onwards where all the votes are brought together and 'counted'

The possibilities for rigging the election at this point onwards in the count are endless.

However, since the whole country is now thinking and about e-voting and democracy in general and think we have to ask ourselves, can 1 person really represent 20,000 people.? Is this democractic? And the answer in my humble opinion is a big No. In fact's it absurd to think it can and the fact that you can't even recall one's representative nor hold them to account is another major glaring hole in the process.

Now some people might argue it's better than nothing and sure what's else can we do, -but we should accept the fact it is NOT the be all and end all. And before you solve a problem, you have to first recognise that you have one.

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Comments (4 of 4)