Why were Fianna Fail so enthusiastic about e-voting?

jetsonx

We all know about the costly (for the taxpayer) saga of FF's master plan for e-voting in Ireland.

But, why were Fianna Fail so enthusiastic about e-voting? As with any of their plans, you can always rest assured their was an ulterior motive. So, what was it with e-voting machines and FF? What was their real motive?

Traumadoc

they provide a significant local financial boost?

Poulgorm

There was a lot of money wasted on those voting machines.

But only a fraction of what we are piddling down the drain on water meters

Greenmachine

"YES" men.

ninty9er

A parliamentary question on the cost of printing, overtime and lieu days surrounding referenda, local, Euro, Dáil and Presidential elections and you should get your answer.

flutered

ninty9er wrote: »

A parliamentary question on the cost of printing, overtime and lieu days surrounding referenda, local, Euro, Dáil and Presidential elections and you should get your answer.

then add no tracabiity, if i voted for candidate x, it could not be proven afterwards, as we all know politicians are to be trusted, they ensure the correct person gets to program them, as da drumcondra gambler said we are not going to be using biros and pencils forever

ninty9er

Your vote is no more traceable on paper than in a machine.

blackwhite

jetsonx wrote: »

We all know about the costly (for the taxpayer) saga of FF's master plan for e-voting in Ireland.

But, why were Fianna Fail so enthusiastic about e-voting? As with any of their plans, you can always rest assured their was an ulterior motive. So, what was it with e-voting machines and FF? What was their real motive?

Absurd as it now sounds given we know how things unfolded, but they actually thought that they'd give them a great PR boost!

The plan was, a once-off large capital expenditure would result in much lower costs of running an election or referendum. IF (and as we know, it was a massive "if") proper machines had been sourced, the cost of storage and maintenance would have been significantly less than the current costs of running a plebiscite "manually."

Fianna Fail would have been able to point to the massive cost savings that they had implented, as well as pointing out how they were modernising the system.

And as all of this would have had the added bonus of every single voter stepping into a voting booth and having a reminder of Fianna Fail's wonderful, cost-saving, modernising system sitting right in front of them whilst they vote.


Of course as we all know, they made a b*ll*x of it all, and now when we go to vote with our paper and pencil we are instead reminded of one of the many things that FF made an @rse of during the boom times.:P

Traumadoc

ninty9er wrote: »

Your vote is no more traceable on paper than in a machine.

when my vote is counted there is a whole raft of tallymen and women observing the whole process, while not perfect i feel the oversight is superior to a computer.

ninty9er

Traumadoc wrote: »

when my vote is counted there is a whole raft of tallymen and women observing the whole process, while not perfect i feel the oversight is superior to a computer.

If you apply the same logic you're applying to e-voting, there's no way of knowing which vote is yours, if it's even there

flutered

ninty9er wrote: »

Your vote is no more traceable on paper than in a machine.

then pray tell how come the legal profession were adamant that it would not stand up in court.

flutered

ninty9er wrote: »

A parliamentary question on the cost of printing, overtime and lieu days surrounding referenda, local, Euro, Dáil and Presidential elections and you should get your answer.

when were ff ever worried about dipping in to the public purse, in my area all the above were/are ff supporters.

nuac

flutered wrote: »

then pray tell how come the legal profession were adamant that it would not stand up in court.

Who claimed this, and when, pls

nuac

flutered wrote: »

when were ff ever worried about dipping in to the public purse, in my area all the above were/are ff supporters.

Many polling office staff and all counting staff are local government employees.

Local government employees are appointed following competitive examination.

Their personal politics would not be known and would be irrelevant to the job they are doing

oscarBravo

ninty9er wrote: »

If you apply the same logic you're applying to e-voting, there's no way of knowing which vote is yours, if it's even there

That's a nonsense comparison.

A ballot box in our current system is just that: a box. The process of voting using our system is easily understood without any technical know-how. You are arguing that an electronic voting system is every bit as trustworthy as a paper voting system, which is self-evidently untrue, as can be determined by a trivial thought experiment:

When I last voted, I marked a piece of paper and placed it in a locked box. As I walked out of the polling station, I knew for a fact that my vote was in the ballot box. If I had pushed a button on a voting machine, I couldn't say that with anything like the same degree of certainty.

There was an analogy doing the rounds at the time: the voting machines were basically the same thing as writing your vote on a piece of paper, then handing it to someone who promised faithfully that he'd put it in the ballot box for you. Would you trust such a system?

This isn't a Luddite perspective. I've worked in IT since 1987, and have been writing software since 1981. It's notable that the people most vocally opposed to electronic voting are those best qualified to understand it.

Sierra Oscar

oscarBravo wrote: »

It's notable that the people most vocally opposed to electronic voting are those best qualified to understand it.

The members of political parties are very much against the idea of electronic voting too. I know in FF there was a large grassroots movement at the time that opposed the government plan to introduce electronic voting.

Naturally some wanted to save the current system to allow for tallying to still take place and whatnot - but when it came down to it they just did not trust electronic voting. Rightly so in my view.

The whole thing was clearly some type of vanity project. A huge waste of time and money.

timetogo

oscarBravo wrote: »

This isn't a Luddite perspective. I've worked in IT since 1987, and have been writing software since 1981. It's notable that the people most vocally opposed to electronic voting are those best qualified to understand it.

So you'd know that systems aren't just programmed by one person. There are teams with project managers, tech leads, programmers, testers and auditors which should be external. I don't know about how the evoting machines were set up but I'd assume some logging was implemented that could be looked at in test. These days they'd need a security company to do an audit as well to attempt to highlight any vulnerabilities. They'd have access to the source code and should be able to test against the systems too. If a security review wasn't done I'm sure a parliamentary question would kick that off.

To say that evoting machines could be voting for somebody else when you're making your vote is true but it requires a conspiracy. I presume the order for the corrupt system would come from the minister to the project manager who'd tell the programmers what to do and then any review or test of the system in the future would require the auditors to be in on it as well. They'd all need to keep quiet. All possible, I'm sure. Not really likely.

Who are those that are most opposed to evoting?
They've managed evoting in France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium etc. etc. I don't think we should do stuff just because other countries have. However, they seem to have sorted any security / trust issues they have with machines.

But after all that I'm not sure of the competence of our government / country to set up evoting. For the original machines I'd imagine there was some brown envelope messing about which led to the crap we got. For our current goverment they can't even manage to set up a water company without it being an absolute shambles. I wouldn't trust them with evoting, not because they're corrupt but because they're not competent.

oscarBravo

timetogo wrote: »

So you'd know that systems aren't just programmed by one person. There are teams with project managers, tech leads, programmers, testers and auditors which should be external. I don't know about how the evoting machines were set up but I'd assume some logging was implemented that could be looked at in test. These days they'd need a security company to do an audit as well to attempt to highlight any vulnerabilities. They'd have access to the source code and should be able to test against the systems too. If a security review wasn't done I'm sure a parliamentary question would kick that off.

All of which is wonderful - but how can you know for certain that the software running on the machine you're using is the same software that passed all this rigorous testing?

To say that evoting machines could be voting for somebody else when you're making your vote is true but it requires a conspiracy.

I don't know about you, but I'm not prepared to stake the trustworthiness of our entire electoral system on the belief that conspiracies don't happen.

Besides, a conspiracy isn't a requirement: a hardware or software error will do just as well.

Another thought experiment: imagine if, at the end of a full day's voting, the voting machine is asked to report its totals, and it reports that no votes have been cast. What happens then?

Less dramatically, what happens if the number of ballots reported by the voting machines is substantially different from the number of names marked off the register as having voted? Oh wait, that's not a thought experiment - that actually happened in Ireland during the trials of the e-voting machines.

I presume the order for the corrupt system would come from the minister to the project manager who'd tell the programmers what to do and then any review or test of the system in the future would require the auditors to be in on it as well. They'd all need to keep quiet. All possible, I'm sure. Not really likely.

You're describing just one single attack vector, and not the most likely one.

Who are those that are most opposed to evoting?
They've managed evoting in France, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium etc. etc. I don't think we should do stuff just because other countries have. However, they seem to have sorted any security / trust issues they have with machines.

How do you know? "I'm sure they probably work fine" may be a good enough standard for you to entrust an entire electoral system to machines, but not me.

Anyway, it's not true, certainly in the Netherlands at least.

skooterblue2

Sierra Oscar wrote: »

The whole thing was clearly some type of vanity project. .

I believe If the project was sucessful we would have very successful referenda in future with 100% of the electorate voting and 95% voting in favour of the Government of the day (ie Fianna Fail)

jetsonx

skooterblue2 wrote: »

I believe If the project was sucessful we would have very successful referenda in future with 100% of the electorate voting and 95% voting in favour of the Government of the day (ie Fianna Fail)

lol@ skooterblue

In hindsight, the e-voting machines saga was like something out of Animal Farm.

The most toxic and corrupt party in the country was keen as mustard to roll-out e-voting machines where a sleight-of-hand election manipulation would have been so much easier to execute.

And remember, if there was any investigation into "voting anomalies", any skewing of results could always be easily attributed to a "technical glitch".
Corruption(™Fianna Fail).

oscarBravo

jetsonx wrote: »

And remember, if there was any investigation into "voting anomalies"...

If the system had incorporated any possibility of such an investigation, I might not have been quite so vehemently opposed to it.