Madam,

As a software developer with experience of tallying, I am in favour of electronic voting provided that it is safe and transparent. My opinion is that the proposed system is neither.

In our paper system, each voter sees that his/her vote is placed in the ballot box and is marked as intended (because they mark it themselves). 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 they 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 can not tell whether a machine is altering votes or counting correctly (regardless of how computer-literate they are). At the count centre, agents only see 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 than it 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 a large number of voting machines, since the agents could note the results from each machine and check that their total matched the official one (any error in combining the results from machines could be detected). In the Irish system, it would only be necessary to tamper the count centre PC. This would make tampering logistically much easier since only one machine (per constituency) has to be tampered, and being a PC, it is easier to tamper than the voting machine.

All that would be required to tamper the system would be for someone to break in to where the machines are stored between elections (or bribe a security guard) before the election (to install software). There are numerous other ways, including bribing an employee of the software vendors (and this is assuming that all of the staff involved in the election are completely honest).

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 consituencies, chosen at random, and where a candidate requests a recount.

This 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 the government was elected fairly.

Yours, etc.,
John Lambe (Green Party member),
64 Brighton Road, Rathgar, Dublin 6
jlambe@johnlambe.com