Madam - The Minister for the Environment asks why objections to his electronic voting system are only now emerging. He need look no further than his own Department.
I have been trying to get details of the system from the Department since October 2002 using the Freedom of Information Act. The fees for nine requests, five internal reviews and one appeal to the Information Commissioner have cost me €1,275 to date.
The Department has consistently made it difficult by not releasing documents until asked directly, by refusing other documents because of commercial confidentiality, by delaying in answering each of my requests until the last day permitted by the FoI legislation, and by choosing not to have certain records in its possession. As an exercise in openness this was, and still is, a farce.
The Department has not released one single design document from the authors of the counting software, nor has it released the source code. When I asked the Department to use Section 6(9) of the FoI Act to obtain these records from Powervote, I was told in April 2003 that the Department "had no current contract" with the supplier.
Despite the absence of this contract, the Department last year shipped and invoiced 4,450 new voting machines costing over €20 million to returning officers around the country. They even shipped 1,100 of these machines before the design was certified on September 19th by PTB, the German testing institute.
The contract with Powervote/Nedap was eventually signed on December 19th, 2003 but the Department delayed releasing a copy to me until last Wednesday, February 11th.
The contract reveals the following:
1. The Department has bought 6,000 new voting machines at €5,008 each, less a 10 per cent discount for volume. These are a new model, ESI 2, which has never been piloted in Ireland.
2. The Department had to spend €2.4 million to upgrade the existing stock of 1,006 machines bought in 2002. These have been sent back to the factory in Holland to be changed from model ESI 1 to model ESI 2 at a cost of €2,393 each.
3. Notably, the testing which the Department asked PTB to conduct excluded the Irish statutory requirements. In any case the contract requires payment whether acceptance testing is passed or not.
4. The machines are warranted only until December 2007 and maintenance services are available for just 10 years, despite the Minister's statement that these machines would last 20 years.
On the Powervote/Nedap website these machines are priced at €3,700 in the UK and €3,600 in France. We are paying about €1,300 more for each one - a total of €9.14 million. This does not look like good value for the taxpayer.
The same Powervote/Nedap system which the Minister has decided to use here has been piloted in the UK. The pilots were carried out on machines rented from the returning officer in Dublin. Following two pilots, the UK Electoral Commission decided that electronic voting was premature and decided not to use the system until it was safe.
We still have no information on how the counting software works. The Dutch programmer has not yet finished developing it and it remains to be finally tested.
Franz Kafka would have enjoyed the contradiction in the Department's stance: "We can't give you any information because we have no contract, but we are paying millions for machines at the same time."
As a computer professional for over 30 years and as an election agent for over 15 years I have to say that in my professional opinion this system is poorly specified, inadequately tested and, without a voter-verified paper audit trail, it is a danger to Irish democracy. It should not be used in June.
We need a statutorily independent Electoral Commission to protect our democratic system. - Yours, etc.,
JOE McCARTHY, Claremont Road, Sandymount, Dublin 4.
Madam, - As a software developer with experience of tallying, I am in favour of electronic voting provided it is safe and transparent. My opinion is that the proposed system is neither.
In our paper system, each voter sees that his or her vote is placed in the ballot box and is marked as intended. In our new electronic system, the voter sees the vote displayed (electronically) but has no way of knowing whether the machine recorded it correctly (a tampered machine could alter some votes, as they are entered, in favour of a particular candidate).
In our paper system, agents (people nominated by the candidates) are entitled to see the ballot boxes at all times from before voting starts until the boxes are sealed, and again before they are opened in the count centre. They also watch the ballot papers being counted and count a sample of votes themselves as a tally. In the electronic system, agents can be present but cannot tell whether a machine is altering votes or counting correctly (regardless of how computer-literate they are). At the count centre, agents see only ballot modules (the devices which hold the votes recorded by each voting machine) being placed in the reader. They are not even shown the results from each voting machine individually.
This system uses the same voting machine as the Dutch system but is even less transparent because, in the Netherlands, each machine prints its results in the polling station after the election. This means that rigging a Dutch election would involve tampering with a large number of voting machines, since the agents could note the results from each machine and check that their totals matched the official one (any error in combining the results from machines could be detected). In the Irish system, it would be necessary only to tamper with the count centre PC.
One can have the best of both worlds by the use of a voter-verifiable audit trail, where the voting machine prints a record of each vote for the voter to see (but not mark or take away), then stores this in a ballot box. A manual count of these papers could then be done in a few constituencies, chosen at random, and where a candidate requests a recount.
The proposed system poses a serious threat to democracy since it makes rigging an election very feasible, and means that voters can never know for sure whether or not a government was elected fairly. - Yours, etc.,
JOHN LAMBE, (Green Party member), Brighton Road, Rathgar, Dublin 6.