Ireland has a curious and therefore very Irish experience with electronic voting machines. Wikipedia summarises the entire debacle:
<blockquote>Electronic voting machines for elections in the Republic of Ireland were used on a trial basis in 2002, but plans to extend it to all polling stations were put on hold in 2004 after public opposition and political controversy. Electoral law was amended in 2001 and 2004 and sufficient voting machines for the entire state were purchased, but the plan was officially dropped in 2009 and the machines were subsequently scrapped. Elections continue to use paper ballots completed in pencil.</blockquote>
The whole entry is worth reading.
A Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp demonstrated how easy it was to falsify results in elections when these machines were used.
The final result was a move away from e voting to “stupid old pencils” (Bertie Ahern ex Prime Minister).
That was a while ago you might say. Yes, but as we know, if someone is smart enough to devise a system someone else will be smart enough to hack it.
5 comments:
The enthusiasm for computerized voting systems appears to be inversely proportional to knowledge of computing. The elected officials say "Computers!", the technologist say, "Um, well, wait a minute." Rebecca Mercuri has been studying these matters for years, and has plenty to say about them.
Thanks George. I looked up Mercuri. Clearly the Irish for once dodged a bullet by sticking with the 'stupid old pencils'. In relation to the American elections however deep their suspicions the lack of a paper trail means they cannot prove there was hookery even though circumstantially the thing stinks.
Most of the machines used in the US do in fact create a paper trail. One votes with a touchscreen device, it prints out a ballot that looks like the one filled out with pencil, and then one feeds it into a scanner. The scanner does the tabulation, but the paper ballots remain for verification. They do have the advantage that an American ballot can have a remarkable number of offices to vote for, running between president and (in Washington, DC) advisory neighborhood commissioner, and automatic tabulation saves more time here than it would in other countries.
I would add that Biden's margin largely came from mailed in ballots, which necessarily are hand-filled and available for audit. The complaints brought by Powell and Giuliani came after the Trump campaign's claims of fraud in mail-in voting had been rejected by courts and elected officials.
That’s interesting. Then they ought to be able to tell if the paper (copy of e vote) has been fed multiple times through the tabulating machine if that is what is being alleged. There will be a mismatch between the totals of e vote and tabulated vote. If I read Mercuri correctly she claims that what the voter selects may not be otherwise recorded. Very fraught method. Why the obstruction of scrutineers? Even if it is all vexatious, - we wuz robbed- it ought to be thrashed out in court for the sake of national peace.
" Why the obstruction of scrutineers?" What obstruction of scrutineers? It has been thrashed out in court, but the parties that took the thrashing, having run out of plausible arguments to raise, raise their voices instead.
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