Update on electronic voting in Ireland

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Electronic voting in Ireland
Date: Mon, 3 May 2004 19:05:39 +0100
From: Adrian Colley <aecolley () spamcop net>
To: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>

Last year you distributed (http://www.politechbot.com/p-04787.html) the
announcement of the creation of the pressure group now called Irish
Citizens for Trustworthy Evoting (http://evoting.cs.may.ie/).  At the
time, it was threatened to deploy a badly designed, unaudited and (it
turns out) poorly-tested direct-recording electronic voting system for
all elections in Ireland.

Mounting political and media pressure finally forced the Irish
Government to appoint an independent commission to "verify" the security
and secrecy of the Nedap/Powervote e-voting system.  On Friday, the
commission produced its initial report
(http://www.cev.ie/htm/report/index.htm) which is a damning indictment
of the system.  Among other things, they found that the counting
software was incorrect, the hardware it ran on was easily hacked, it was
never fully tested, and the vendors are still clinging to the source
code as a trade secret.

The Government, which has been claiming for a long time that the system
was fully tested, fully accurate and fully secure, and that anyone who
opposed it was a Luddite, a crank, or even an anti-globalisation
protestor, is now trying to spin the report as an inconclusive report
which calls for more time and doesn't identify any serious problems.
While the domestic press isn't fooled by this, the matter hasn't been
mentioned in any non-Irish press as yet, even the outlets that were
quick to report Ireland's original moves towards e-voting.

The system vendors, Nedap/Powervote, are also trying to sell variants of
the same system in Germany, the Netherlands, and (more recently) the UK
and France.  IT professionals in those countries may want to study the
Irish experience to see what they're in for.

 --Adrian.

--
GPG 0x43D3AD19 17D2 CA6E A18E 1177 A361  C14C 29DB BA4B 43D3 AD19
http://user-aecolley.jini.org/


_______________________________________________
Politech mailing list
Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/
Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)