-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Electronic voting in Ireland Date: Mon, 3 May 2004 19:05:39 +0100 From: Adrian Colley <aecolley@private> To: Declan McCullagh <declan@private> Last year you distributed (http://www.politechbot.com/p-04787.html) the announcement of the creation of the pressure group now called Irish Citizens for Trustworthy Evoting (http://evoting.cs.may.ie/). At the time, it was threatened to deploy a badly designed, unaudited and (it turns out) poorly-tested direct-recording electronic voting system for all elections in Ireland. Mounting political and media pressure finally forced the Irish Government to appoint an independent commission to "verify" the security and secrecy of the Nedap/Powervote e-voting system. On Friday, the commission produced its initial report (http://www.cev.ie/htm/report/index.htm) which is a damning indictment of the system. Among other things, they found that the counting software was incorrect, the hardware it ran on was easily hacked, it was never fully tested, and the vendors are still clinging to the source code as a trade secret. The Government, which has been claiming for a long time that the system was fully tested, fully accurate and fully secure, and that anyone who opposed it was a Luddite, a crank, or even an anti-globalisation protestor, is now trying to spin the report as an inconclusive report which calls for more time and doesn't identify any serious problems. While the domestic press isn't fooled by this, the matter hasn't been mentioned in any non-Irish press as yet, even the outlets that were quick to report Ireland's original moves towards e-voting. The system vendors, Nedap/Powervote, are also trying to sell variants of the same system in Germany, the Netherlands, and (more recently) the UK and France. IT professionals in those countries may want to study the Irish experience to see what they're in for. --Adrian. -- GPG 0x43D3AD19 17D2 CA6E A18E 1177 A361 C14C 29DB BA4B 43D3 AD19 http://user-aecolley.jini.org/ _______________________________________________ Politech mailing list Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
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