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Human Rights in Ireland
Indymedia Ireland is a volunteer-run non-commercial open publishing website for local and international news, opinion & analysis, press releases and events. Its main objective is to enable the public to participate in reporting and analysis of the news and other important events and aspects of our daily lives and thereby give a voice to people.

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So, how does E-voting work in Ireland? The government can't tell you!

category national | miscellaneous | news report author Monday May 26, 2003 22:08author by Phuq Hedd Report this post to the editors

P45.net article by Michael Cunningham

People concerned with the switch to electronic voting have been arguing in the abstract about potential problems. M.Cunningham decided to actually ask for the source-code that the Irish govt. has bought. He was surprised by the answer.

One of the central arguments advanced by advocates of Free Software http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/ and Open Source Software http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html is that all of the source-code for any application should be available for peer-review so that bugs can be identified, security risks evaluated and fixes made.

This is especially attractive in the case of software used by our governments, whether it's in databases used to store sensitive personal information on us (health records, criminal records, tax records etc) or running the machines which count our votes. (Farce though voting is, at least those that participate in it have some sort of assurance that their ballot is not lost or discarded by an error -- unless they have a dimpled chad of course!).


It is for this reason that many European countries are moving to the adoption of GNU/Linux as a standard for government programs.

Therefore it comes as more of a disappointment that our government _can_not_ guarantee or describe how the machines that are to tally our votes are supposed to work, nor even supply the source-code to citizens that request it.

It is time for Ireland to mandate that Free Software licenses are essential to all government purchased software.

This story is also being discussed on Slashdot:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/25/0320259&mode=thread&tid=185

Related Link: http://p45.net/dos_prompt/columns/28.html

 #   Title   Author   Date 
   Absolutely agree in principle (not detail)     Mike    Tue May 27, 2003 13:38 
   1984 stuff     Killian Forde    Tue May 27, 2003 16:41 
   Agree with Phuqehead as well     Lone gunman    Tue May 27, 2003 20:00 
   I've started to think I must be wrong...     Phuq Hedd    Tue May 27, 2003 20:46 


 
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