Totting up e-votes Bill

NET RESULTS:The election is over and done with now except for the count and, to the Taoiseach's apparent disappointment, it has all been done using - as he once so eloquently phrased it - "stupid old pencils".

This was instead of using the €55 million of mothballed electronic voting machines that are gathering dust in storage to the tune of about €800,000 annually.

The election itself triggered memories of these sad metal behemoths quietly ageing in a warehouse somewhere, and e-voting once again became something of a minor issue as election day approached.

For those who have forgotten the background, the machines were originally purchased from Dutch firm Nedap for the 2004 election under the direction of minister for the environment Martin Cullen, although the original drive for them came from his predecessor, Noel Dempsey.

Citizen opposition to the idea gelled into a group calling itself Irish Citizens for Trustworthy eVoting.

Somehow, against the odds for such an abstract topic, the issue turned into a prominent story for weeks as experts debated the reliability and accountability of the machines.

Two years earlier, when no one cared much about e-voting and the topic was about as exciting as a Windows manual, I had written a column opposing the general idea of using electronic voting machines for all the reasons that were cited during the debate in 2004 and which have been cited by computing and security experts for years.

To wit: the machines do not produce a paper printout as an audit trail and the machines do not run on open-source code that can be examined and guaranteed to be tamper-free.

I ended the piece by quoting from renowned security expert Bruce Schneier: "A secure internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application ever created in the history of computers." (His emphasis, not mine.)

The Government-appointed Commission on Electronic Voting came to the somewhat less dramatic conclusion that the machines should not be used until reliability and security concerns were closely examined and addressed. That's where we stand now.

In the US, similar concerns are to the fore, but only well after many states have been using the machines for some time. Actually, there's a cause and effect there - people are very concerned as to whether the machines are accurate and actually work.

After an election last year in Florida, there were indications that e-voting machines may have "undercounted" 18,000 votes in Sarasota County. The problem is, no one actually knows because the machines produce no audit trail.

Whatever about Sarasota, politicians here would blanche at the idea of a missing 18,000 votes. That's like the entire city of Kilkenny going missing.

There are proposals in the US for federal legislation to make a paper audit trail a requirement for e-voting machines by November 2008. Some 23 states still do not have such a requirement. States that have converted to such a regime have been able to effect the software changes within about eight months.

Lots of people however still oppose the machines because their software code is not available to be checked.

As one letter writer to the New York Times notes: "A computer can easily be programmed, without the knowledge of anyone except the programmer, to accept a vote for candidate A, give the vote to candidate B and print a vote on the paper trail for candidate A."

Will our machines ever emerge from the bowels of their storage places? The Taoiseach has made clear he would like to see it. He has pointed to the report from the Commission on Electronic Voting, which states that new software could be installed to give a paper trail, at a cost of about €500,000.

The problem, as solicitor and Digital Rights Ireland member Simon McGarr pointed out to me recently, is that he doesn't add that the report also makes clear this is the cost of developing the software - not implementing it.

Implementation, says the report, comes in about €17 million, or one-third of the cost of the machines.

Blog: www.techno-culture. com