7,000 Irish e-Voting Machines To Be Scrapped

lampsie writes "You may recall from back in January 2012 that the Irish government had deemed their stock of 7,000 e-voting machines 'worthless.' Turns out they are not — after spending upwards of €54 million purchasing them almost a decade ago, all 7,000 will now be scrapped for €70,000 (just over nine Euros each). The machines were scrapped because 'they could not be guaranteed to be safe from tampering [...] and they could not produce a printout so that votes/results could be double-checked.'"

How Difficult Is It Really?

[AnotherAnonymousUser]

As a question for the geeks and engineers of the community - how truly difficult is it to make one of these voting machines safe for use? Is there something I'm missing that would make it difficult to have a kiosk with an imaged system that's been certified, locked down, and can print out results, without it being easy to tamper with or easy to fudge the numbers of? It seems like this is something that engineers could have designed to be foolproof by now, and at a fraction of the budget. How truly complex is the problem they're trying to solve?

use the same system for slot machines

[Joe_Dragon]

use the same system for slot machines
they go under lots of testing to make them hard to cheat them even to the point of shocking them.

Re:How Difficult Is It Really?

[pegasustonans]

How truly complex is the problem they're trying to solve?

Nothing that an old-fashioned optical scan ballot couldn't handle.

In other words, using the machine was a solution looking for a problem (and causing numerous problems of its own).

Re:How Difficult Is It Really?

[alteridem]

I believe it is actually more difficult than it would appear, mainly because you need to give people access to the machine to enter the candidates and when you do that, you are potentially giving them access to do other things. That said, the problem is not insurmountable. I would suggest open-sourcing the software and the hardware design. There are enough people that are interested in this problem that I expect that it would be well supported and potential security flaws found and fixed quickly. It would also greatly reduce the development costs. We would still need companies and governments to work together to build and certify the machines, but everyone could be working off a common, open blueprint.

Re:How Difficult Is It Really?

[EnergyScholar]

It's really, really difficult to secure electronic voting machines and the associated system. Close to impossible. Worse, what's the point? Seriously, electronic voting does nothing new, and adds many new vectors for systemic fraud. It's a losing proposition, unless you wish to defraud the voting system, in which case it's a win.

Re:How Difficult Is It Really?

[Skapare]

Electronic voting speeds up the results. But it's only the new media that wants that.

The design I proposed was a triple path election system. There would be simple machines to vote at that produce three "results": paper, storage, and communication. But it is the paper result that counts. The stored results (on a CF card) are just for verification. The communicated results are just for the media. The paper result is actually handed to the voter. It will be printed in clear text with the names of who they voted for, and a bar code or QR code to checksum the vote. They take the paper over to the ballot box area. But first, the paper is scanned by a reader right there. Then the paper is inserted into the sealed ballot box. The scanner also stores results and transmits these results separately, which are cross checked. The official results will be the paper count. But the electronic results satisfy the media hunger for instant answers.

Re:use the same system for slot machines

[khendron]

I pay my bills online.
I do my banking online.
I order my shopping online...

And all those activities are the target of a significant amount of fraud. It is tolerated, though, because the savings outweigh the costs. You can't say the same for an election.

Re:How Difficult Is It Really?

[TapeCutter]

If they can seal an ATM, they can seal a voting machine. This truly isn't rocket science.

No it's not rocket science, nor is it ATM science. Learn how and why the traditional paper systems work and one day you may understand why the quote above is 'not even wrong'.

This method is used in Sweden for example, and conducted as follows. The voter casts three ballots, one for each of the three elections (national, regional, and local), each in a sealed envelope. The party and candidate names are pre-printed on the ballot, or the voter can write them in on a blank ballot. When voting has finished, all envelopes are opened on the counting table, for one election at a time. They are sorted in piles according to party, inspecting them for validity. The piles are then counted manually, while witnesses around the table observe. The count is recorded, and the same pile is counted again. If the results do not agree, it is counted a third time. When all piles are counted and the results agree, the result is certified and transmitted for central tabulation. The count as received is made public, to allow anyone to double-check the tabulation and audit the raw data. There appears to be a high level of confidence in this system among the population, as evidenced by the lack of criticism of it." - Shamelessly C&P from WP.

The last sentance in the quote hits the nail on the head, elections are about trust, anyone who thinks electronic voting is a good idea should be asking themselves what "problem" are they "solving"?