E-voting returns to the spotlight

Net Results: With the Presidential election campaign reaching its final stages in the US, attention has swung back again not just to the candidates but the voting process itself.

This time it has nothing to do directly with the infamous hanging chads of Florida in 2000, which led to the Supreme Court having to decide the result of the presidential race. This time, it's a subject many Irish people will understand - electronic voting.

Electronic voting is something that many governments seem to want just as adamantly as the people do not. You can see why governments want it - they see it as a time-saving, efficient, low-cost, more reliable way of voting. And you can see why lots of people do not want it - voting is a fundamental democratic right that determines who the government is, so people want a transparent voting process with some kind of auditability.

In the case of electronic voting, this can't be guaranteed.

According to many of the world's leading computing and risk experts, the systems are potentially open to tampering, have no auditability and can malfunction.

Also, the trust of the electorate must shift away from the precinct workers who supervise the voting and oversee the ballot counting process - who in turn are under close supervision to avoid vote fraud - to a nameless, invisible group of computer programmers and developers who wrote the voting software and monitor any problems with it. And, of course, trust in the already-elected government not to try and pull one over.

In Florida, the bitter taste of the last election and the chads fiasco remains in many mouths, and for many has turned into huge distrust about the voting process. That has led a group to challenge the State's use of electronic voting machines.

Federal judges have ordered a lower court to hear a challenge to the use of the existing machines, which the plaintiffs are demanding should print a receipt after a vote is cast so that a public, printed record exists of the way a voter voted.

The lower court initially threw out the suit which, if successful, could potentially halt the entire Florida State voting process. Federal judges said such inconvenience was no reason not to hear the challenge.

Meanwhile, voters have also come out against the machines in New Jersey, where a group of citizens and elected officials filed a lawsuit this week trying to block the state's use of 8,000 of the machines in the November 2nd presidential election. The key objections are that the machines provide no receipt for votes cast and remain hackable. The lawyer representing the plaintiffs, Ms Penny Venetis, a law professor with the Constitutional Litigation Clinic at Rutgers University, told the New York Times: "The right to vote is simply too important to not try to get some sort of court intervention to protect it."

In late September, a group of anti-electronic voting activists demonstrated in Washington, DC how the software used on the Diebold voting machines at the heart of these disputes could be tampered with simply by altering the Microsoft Access database files used by the machine - which aren't password protected. The machine stores all the precinct results in such files.

In response, Diebold said the situation used to demonstrate the weakness simply would not happen and that, even in such a case, only the local record of the vote, rather than tabulations for the total vote, would be tampered with.

In other words, these are many of the same arguments we saw here over the use of electronic voting machines, which have been mothballed until the matter can be more carefully considered.

And rightfully so. Voting is such a basic right, so essential to democracy, that voters cannot be left having to trust the word of the government, or of computer experts, that their vote is safe. Indeed, such an assertion in many countries would have the supposedly enlightened democracies of the world that are rushing to use these machines in an uproar, demanding that voting systems and the voting process in those countries be fully auditable through a paper trail.

So why no such similar scrutiny of our own processes, or those in our neighbouring democracies? Why are such basic concerns about these machines portrayed as loony arguments by Luddites? As a counter to such arguments, have a look at this useful list of voting technologies and their potential flaws, produced by advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), who definitely are not Luddites: www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/#info-sheets.

As the EFF argues, it is not that such technologies cannot be useful it is just that they currently have no accountability. "E-voting technology is promising, but its benefits should not obscure its dangers. Without basic auditing checks, these machines dramatically increase the chances for undetectable election fraud."

* * * * *

In my column last week I complained that the role of e-minister had been done away with - as indeed seemed the situation when I made a few enquiries.

Now, I am told that apparently Mr Tom Kitt has been appointed to the role, although not a peep has been heard from his office.

Nothing is mentioned on the Fianna Fáil website. Indeed, the e-ireland section of the governing party's website only contains three items - two broadband announcements and the Taoiseach's address to the Dáil on new ministerial appointees, in which he only mentions Tom Kitt as Chief Whip. But Mr Kitt apparently announced his new e-ministership at an event during the week.

All of which points to how low on the national agenda this role - if it still exists - is and how little real intention there is to get our e-act together.

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