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Electronic voting debate; undermining democracy?

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  • 22-04-2004 9:05am
    #1
    star gazer
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 1,715 Mod ✭✭✭✭


    The debate over electronic voting has been quite divisive and there has been very little movement in position from either side. The argument about this system being a danger to our democracy has been knocking around for a while and with the details that experts and icte have brought to the debate there does appear to be a conclusive argument to adding the Voter Verified Audit Trail.
    However some would argue that the people who are undermining this electronic voting system are undermining Irish democracy. There is a good logic to this argument if certain other factors are present.

    the system being brought in has to improve the irish electoral process over the old paper ballot system and so you have to trust those who are responsible for the system in their arguments about it improving on or at least being equal to the paper ballot.

    the system would eleminate spoilt votes and that is welcome, the system would allow for more structured release of results and theoretically ending the long drawn out counts.

    However, it's easy to trust the present system, we can see the ballot papers and we can see the scrutiny with which all votes get to ensure a proper count. With this E-voting system we have to trust that the supervision of the implementation of best practice around it was up to scratch and that everything has been up front. So we have to trust even without the sponsors being forthcoming with information about E-Voting where information has been slow in coming and has not been complete. It has taken freedom of information requests before the Minister for environment's department would release relevant information on the system and the pilot runs in 2002.

    If it was a question of protecting our democracy, surely the minister would have made sure that everyone knew what was going on. We all know that in a pilot, problems will surface and that is why we have pilots, but when it came to those pilots, the litany of problems that cropped up showed how badly the introduction of electronic voting has been thought through, even with the minister saying how great they had been. Software updates coming at the last minute without telling the operators of the system. Seals broken on machines and still used. Uncreconciled results announced. And incredibly no count by count release of information.

    Ok that was the pilot and this is now, surely all the problems that came up on the day of the pilots can be fixed, maybe. But the real problem is that there has not been any full end to end testing of the up-dated system. Plenty of extra code has been added to the software and the machines themselves have been extensively changed to meet standards written by previous testing reports. problems should be found out now, not in two months time when our electoral process is on the line or not in ten years time when the source code is finally published.

    Opposing this electronic voting system may not be popular but sometimes going against the grain is the right thing to do. VVAT

    ps. something similar to this was posted in the evoting forum but one contributor felt the need to discuss a more wide ranging view of electronic voting and irish democracy.


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