Electronic Voting will open door for election fraud
national |
politics / elections |
news report 
Wednesday February 18, 2004 11:27
by The European
Minister Martin Cullen rejects call for hardcopies
Yesterday on RTE Prime Time Minister Cullen rejected a call for hardcopies of elertonic votes at future elections as well as giving the project more time to have a proper independent commission prepared to ensure proper conduct of the elections.
Yesterday on RTE Prime Time Minister Cullen rejected a call for hardcopies of elertonic votes at future elections as well as giving the project more time to have a proper independent commission prepared to ensure proper conduct of the elections.
On both requests (brought up by a representative of the organization for secure e-voting) he answered by escaping to phrases like "everything had been properly prepared and tested" and "Hardcopies would only lead to confusion"(!).
If elections are really performed like this, it will be easy for the government to stay in power forever, as any investigations in case of doubts could (and will) be blocked as risk for national security (as it happens rather often seems to happen in this country...), there will be no possibility to recount votes (so high court rulings like the one that was necessary to put Mr Bush in power won't be necessary any more), and the "independent commission", that will "ensure proper conduct of elections" will be a rather toothless entity, which can make suggestions only (which can be refused by the government without giving a reason).
Ireland is well on its way back into pre-democratic times, like the USA and many other "western" countries. And people don't give a shit obviously;
I'm a guest here in Ireland, and I love this country. I think the Irish people should not allow their government to destroy this beautiful young plant, before it has even grown proper roots.
Comments (9 of 9)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9There have been errors in several states in the U.S., in which states, they have been either abolished or a paper-trail has been implemented.
There is obviously always the chance there will be problems. For such instances a proper paper, audit, trail, must be put in place.
The government must be lobbyed to implement this.
The Australians threw NEDAP out and developed their own Open Source system in 6 months. Our lot have been at it for more than 4 years and they still haven't got it working right.
The Official site is at
http://www.elections.act.gov.au/Elecvote.html
There's an excellent Wired review at http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,61045,00.html
and see pasted below from the above site.
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" ""Quinn, [the programmer of the system] who was working in Chicago for Motorola during the 2000 presidential election, says he is "gob smacked" by what he sees happening among U.S. electronic voting machine makers, whom he says have too much control over the democratic process.
It has been widely reported that Ohio-based Diebold Election Systems, one of the biggest U.S. voting-machine makers, purposely disabled some of the security features in its software. According to reports the move left a backdoor in the system through which someone could enter and manipulate data.
IN ADDITION, WALDEN O'DELL, DIEBOLD ELECTION SYSTEM'S CHIEF EXECUTIVE, IS A LEADING FUNDRAISER FOR THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. HE STATED RECENTLY THAT HE WAS "COMMITTED TO HELPING OHIO DELIVER ITS ELECTORAL VOTES TO THE PRESIDENT NEXT YEAR.'' :0
"The only possible motive I can see for disabling some of the security mechanisms and features in their system is to be able to rig elections," Quinn said. "It is, at best, bad programming; at worst, the system has been designed to rig an election." "
"I can't imagine what it must be like to be an American in the midst of this and watching what's going on," Quinn added. "Democracy is for the voters, not for the companies making the machines.... I would really like to think that when it finally seeps in to the collective American psyche that their sacred Democracy has been so blatantly abused, they will get mad." "
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Given the above, and FFs past history, the proposed sytem will HAVE to be changed.
Note that the Aussie system cost $125,000
Also, the programmer said that they should have incorporated a voter verified audit trail (VVAT) ie a paper audit, but officials didn't want to spend the money.
So basically the ideal evoting system would have a paper audit trail and be Open Source code.
Also this Flash animation says it all -
http://www.markfiore.com/animation/voting.html
Hows about one of the techie boys hacks the electoral computer and ensures that some heads end up inside the dail and after the photo shot they can dissolve the entire state structure (electronically) and move on to an attempt for the revolution. pas mal?
There's no way anyone should accept the simple bland assurances coming from the government.
The are so many potential flaws and avenues for fraud, accidental loss of results, error and computer bugs, the whole thing is just a joke.
Firstly I have heard from that chap who is doing all the Freedom of Information requests on this, that there are appears to be no proper software quality process in place and the people involved in this in the civil service are out of their depth.
The so-called independent panel of experts is going to be made up of 'distinguished people, and the scope of the panel will be very narrow, -so narrow as to (purposely) miss all the main points by people objecting to this, but of course will allow the government to say they had an independent investigation & review.
At a minimum, the source code should be Open Source. Secondly there should be an audit trail, printed out at every point where votes are collated and brought together,. We are told that you might effectively be able to get a receipt for the actual polling machine for your vote. This is supposed to be their audit. How the heck does anyone know, even if they have paper copies of all the ballots, that what happens inside the machine, either by accident, bug or intentional fraud through modification of the software, what the values are inside the computer.
Another point, is that one of the most important and fundamental theorems on computing -the Church-Turing Theorem which applies to all computers (don't mind anything from the minister on this one, because they don't have a f**king clue), according to this theorem, is that you can never determine that a program is bug free and that it is basically impossible to remove all bugs. The thereom actually relates to the 'stopping problem' and poses the question as to how long any given arbitary program will run for and when will it stop. It turns out it can't be determined. And bugs in programs relate to the program stopping either to early and or taking execution paths you never intended, thus modifying the time to execute.
Anyway, any rational sane person, would realize that this whole business is extremely dodegy and particularly in the manner in which it is being done in such an underhand way and the absolute contempt that the government has for people and the almost childish statements by them.
Besides all the blatantly obvious security concerns, I have a question regarding the choices offerd in an e-voting booth. Will it be possible to write in candidates, spoil ballots, or otherwise voice your objections to the available candidates, through the voting process. Surely it is a fundamental part of the voting process that one should have the ability to so.
Are we simply to be presented with a list of candidates - pick one and that's yer lot?
We have the right to vote for any candidate we wish to, but certainly we should also have the right to vote for none of them. Is this to be a thing of the past?
Could someone tell me where the desire for the overhaul of the voting system is coming from? What is so faulty with the current system that it must be abandoned? Sure there's a definite margin of error, but there's a potential for even greater error in electronic systems. So what's the real story?
in reply to electronic voting will lead to election fraud ...............I agree it will . The fianna fail party were economical with the truth at the last election . With the e voting they are forcing in without debate or discussion they will be able to bypass the tedious business of democracy and install themselves into power indefinitely.
Why can't we have a Referendum using the normal democratic system of voting to find out if the majority of the electorate want e voting?
Martin Cullen was not on Prime Time on Tuesday 17th February 2004. The governent representative was Minister for State Pat the Cope Gallagher T.D.
The representative from ICTE was Margeret McGaley, longtime E-voting researcher.
(sorry for mixing this up)
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