One Man, One %TEXT NOT FOUND%

25Apr07

Picture by colmmacc Some rights reserved.

Apparently An Taoiseach thinks that we’re the laughing stock of Europe for not rolling out eVoting (see this RTE News article). Hmm… I’m sure they’re having a good laugh at us in France right now where their Nedap voting machines, the same ones we currently have in warehouses, are causing problems.

As someone who has worked as a software developer for years eVoting is something that really bothers me. To be honest, I’m not that concerned about electoral fraud. It’s not like manual voting hasn’t been the subject of electoral fraud in past, but at least with a manual ballot count you can be pretty sure that it’s being done under the scrutiny of representatives of all parties¹. What I am concerned about is some script kiddie changing my vote to a vote for Senator Palpatine or some buggy, poorly written code that wasn’t tested properly due to budget or time constraints resulting in my vote being lost.

At least a piece of paper with a box on it won’t crash or forget what I voted for.

Incidentally, the picture of the Nedap machine above comes from Colm MacCárthaigh who has a small piece from last year here on how it was hacked.

– Fintan

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1 – And frequently by them as well.

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