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.'"

That depends on your limitations

[Casandro]

Building a voting computer which satisfies the demands for a democratic election is near impossible.
Since fraud needs to be detectable even by single uneducated voters, there minimum security would be like this:

1. Get at least 80% of your voters a degree in Mathematics and Cryptology. They need to be able to verify all the algorithms used in the process.
2. Get at least 80% of your voters fluent in reading machine code off microscope images of ROM chips.
3. Get at least 80% of your voters good at re-engineering micro controller systems from silicon up in a reasonable timespan. (e.g. 30 minutes, this might require genetic engineering)
4. Develop a form of computing device which is transparent.

The big point is, it's not enough if we have some "perfect" voting computer which 10 specialists attest to be "perfect". For a democratic election everybody who is allowed to vote must be able to check the system for fraud. With a simple pen and paper system that is trivial. You just sit at the polling station, check that only single sheets are handed out to the voters. You also check that the voting urn is empty when the voting starts and that everybody just puts in his single sheet into it. Then you check the counting for miscounts and people trying to hide votes. The total number of votes can be compared in different ways.

So everybody involved in it can check it. There is no secret knownledge involved. You can come up with the points I just wrote by yourself. You can even find the points I was missing. That's the minimum standard for voting systems, and it can be settled by the cheapest way to conduct elections, pen and paper. Why on earth should we spend a lot of money for much worse systems?

Re:use the same system for slot machines

[rtfa-troll]

Nobody actually knows how hard this is since nobody has ever actually succeeded in doing it, despite the fact that many people have tried. Here is another example:

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.

This is one of the standard examples, the other given is bank machines. The average engineer/computer scientest will tell you this every time up to the stage of actually starting voting machine companies and spending millions on delivering machines which fail to be sufficiently secure. Just think about how much more hostile the voting machine environment

• if you cheat a slot machine you can get a few hundred dollars - if you beat a voting machine you can controll F22 contracts worth US$66.7 billion
• slot machines are run in an environemnt where you can watch the users - watching voters is illegal
• you can see who wins on your slot machine and almost nobody cares - voters are supposed to be anonymous
• slot machines are essentially static; the money is put in and taken out in the bar - voting machines have to be distributed to many locations
• your slot machine will still earn money even if it is completely emptied several times a year - a voting machine only needs to lose once

It's true that the slot Las Vegas slot machine program is much better than any current voting machine goes through. That is outrageous. However, don't think that if you did follow the Las Vegas system that would be enough.