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Before calling the election Bertie was embarrassed at us for using pencils to vote and said we were the laughing stock of Europe for not having e-voting.
Who’s laughing now Bertie? Certainly not the Scots whose e-counting system has contributed to what the BBC has described as “voting chaos”.
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Colm Burke MEP reckons that we need to get honest and tell people we will be holding a second Lisbon Vote in Oct 2009 with protocols desigend to secure a yes vote.
Lets not get ahead of our selves here, The fact that local elections and assembly elections, which both use different voting systems, were held on the same day should account for some of this also.
Those that filled in the ballot papers incorrectly on a “pencils only” election would have had their votes marked as a spoiled vote also.
That being said, I am against electironic voting as I would rather see physical voting paper being counted rather than virtual votes.
The BBC has a nice follow up giving more detail on the problems. As for our e voting system, I’ve already said it need to be scrapped given both the technological and inherent design flaws. In fairness to the UK, their Electoral Commission has undertaken some serious pilot studies and has listened to group’s like the Usability Professionals’ Association (UK branch) when designing their systems.
It goes to show that even with the advice of experts that getting electronic voting to work is no easy task.
E-voting caused problems in France last week as well. The mad thing about paper and pencil is they’re not prone to viruses or power failures. But that’s the kind of clear thinking that would get me called a luddite. Now I must go and update my blog using pieces of flint and animal bones.
Scotland isn’t using or trialling electronic voting machines.
The technical fubarring all relates to the electronic vote *counting* machines, which are suffering widespread mechanical failure. The ballots were pencil-on-paper.
Sadly they apparently had some sort of “guide gum” strip on the back of them, which when subjected to the heat of (say) a machine which has just absorbed the kinetic energy of ten thousand fast-moving ballot papers, started peeling off into the counting machines’ rollers. Leading directly to total mechanical failure.
The irony of this one is that most of us who don’t want compromised e-voting machines would approve of this one in principle because there’s a paper audit and recounts can be done. Just happens that the company in question today has arse-elbow differentiation issues.
[Covered this morning here.]
Get lickin’ dem tumbs lads!
There used to be a chap on the FF payroll called Martin Cullen.
Has he been retired to Brussels or what?
I seem to recall that he used to have photo-ops - daily.
Maybe he died, without a state funeral - or an oration from de Bert on his wonderful contribution to Ireland?
And we didn’t even notice.
A sad loss.
Leave Bertie Alone!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIAoSZIEx14
Scotland’s problems were with the COUNTING machines. But why can’t we be more like Estonia, which has introduced online voting;
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/evote/0,72846-0.html?tw=wn_index_1
“You trust your money with the internet, and you won’t trust your vote? I don’t think so,” said Tarvi Martens, project manager for the country’s e-voting project.
Surely this is a logical goal of Reachservices.ie? Online voting provides convenience to the voting; Reachservices.ie provides the necessary ID validation & perhaps most relevently to this post -> It would be IMPOSSIBLE to spoil a vote; any remotely competent developer would create the necessary pages with validation checks to ensure you couldn’t - prompting you to correct the error(s) before it’ll allow you to continue. The success of Revenue Online Services surely indicates that this is an achievable goal (& could operate similarly, i.e. login @ Reach, which would let you login @ Voting site). Not to mention that detailed transaction info. can be kept (IP address, etc.).
Paper ballots are antiquated & unreliable, hell, people can’t even reliably fill them in right. More effort needs to be put into technology.
Forgot to add, before responding to me please consider the following first;
You can bank online, e.g. 365 Online
You can pay & claim taxes online - Revenue Online Services
You can book flights online, e.g. Ryanair
You can invest online, e.g. Rabodirect
You can buy/sell every good imaginable online, e.g. Amazon.co.uk
You can make CAO applications online.
Ironically, you can even check if you’re on the electoral register online.
“But why can’t we be more like Estonia, which has introduced online voting;”
Quite simply because our constitution calls for a secret ballot, something which is impossible with online voting. I for one will not be voting to scrap the secret ballot.
““You trust your money with the internet, and you won’t trust your vote? I don’t think so,” said Tarvi Martens, project manager for the country’s e-voting project.”
This canard is very easily dismissed, and if you’ve followed the e-voting debate in Ireland at all you’ll have seen it dismissed multiple times. In short, voting is different from banking or shopping or any of the other activities you describe, because once your vote is cast there is no way to verify that it has been counted correctly. With online banking any errors will be immediately evident, and you can maintain your own records in the case of a dispute.
“Quite simply because our constitution calls for a secret ballot, something which is impossible with online voting. I for one will not be voting to scrap the secret ballot.”
That’s not a problem either. Personally identifiable details can be hashed to maintain secrecy.
“This canard is very easily dismissed, and if you’ve followed the e-voting debate in Ireland at all you’ll have seen it dismissed multiple times. In short, voting is different from banking or shopping or any of the other activities you describe, because once your vote is cast there is no way to verify that it has been counted correctly. With online banking any errors will be immediately evident, and you can maintain your own records in the case of a dispute.”
& in a secret ballot how can you verify “your” ballot paper has been counted correctly either? It’s worth noting that the UK also trialled online voting in a few places during this election. The counting machine crashed in 2 areas, however, they were zero complaints about the votes thmselves. A manual count has to take place instead. Surely you can get around that with printouts / confirmation screens, i.e. “You voted for X. Thank You”.
Whatever concerns there are that need to be addressed consider that there were 100000+ spoiled votes in Scotland this week… this would be impossible with online voting due to data integrity checks that could be used (e.g. if you select 2 candidates instead of 1 you’d be prompted of such & that it must be corrected before continuing).
“That’s not a problem either. Personally identifiable details can be hashed to maintain secrecy.”
That only addresses the secrecy of the vote data while it’s being transmitted over the Internet. The problem is that online voting is that it takes place in an unsupervised location, e.g. the voter’s home. There is no way to guarantee that the voter is not voting under duress or in return for payment. Once you allow the possibility of a third party witnessing the act of voting, you open the door for vote rigging. Think about it.
“& in a secret ballot how can you verify “your” ballot paper has been counted correctly either?”
You can’t, but you can have confidence that each stage of the process is subject to independent verification, so once you put your ballot in the box you can be confident it will reach the count centre, where the counting process itself is subject to independent oversight. Again, this is not possible with electronic voting.
“Surely you can get around that with printouts / confirmation screens, i.e. “You voted for X. Thank You”.”
That is worthless, as you have no way of verifying that the printout or confirmation screen matches the vote recorded by the machine.
“Whatever concerns there are that need to be addressed consider that there were 100000+ spoiled votes in Scotland this week… this would be impossible with online voting due to data integrity checks that could be used (e.g. if you select 2 candidates instead of 1 you’d be prompted of such & that it must be corrected before continuing).”
Well, we don’t have anything like that level of vote spoiling with our paper-and-pencil system, so perhaps we’re doing something right.