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.