WRITTEN ON June 29th, 2006 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, What do we want?
Remember when people like the e-Envoy and fresh-faced suppliers had a cheery expectation that all voting would go online as a matter of course, probably by 2005 because we’d made that pledge? Man, they used to give me a hard time when I queried whether this was entirely wise without certain precautions. Well, just like Spanish fans last Wednesday it’s all gone quiet over there and they’re not singing any more. There’s a long and troubling article in Rolling Stone* about it based on a new book Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? : Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official CountAs the blurb says:
How can one explain this eight-million-vote discrepancy between the Election Day exit polls and the official count? Either the exit poll data was wrong or the official count was wrong.
There’s a feeling in the e-gov world that we haven’t yet got to grips with th eimportant stuff. But I think we may have to face up to the fact that rubbish e-voting systems have subverted democracy the world’s richest and – since WW2 – most aggressive country. Am I wrong?
Thanks to DK on the FIPR list
4 Responses to “Just how wrong did this e-voting business go?”
The key figure behind all the machinations in Ohio, according to the Rolling Stone article, was supposedly Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of President Bush’s re-election committee and also, as Ohio Secretary of State, the man in charge of counting the votes in Ohio. The sheer scale of the alleged fraud, the numbers of people supposedly involved in achieving it and the hundreds of thousands of Ohio voters apparently affected make it pretty unlikely that it could be covered up. Indeed Rep. John Conyers of Michigan and Democratic Members and Staff of the House Judiciary Committee published a report on some of the anomalies in Ohio in January 2005 (edited and released as a book in the Spring of 2005) but as far as I’m aware it did not lead to any further action legal or otherwise in pursuit of alleged perpetrators of fraud.
The key thing for me is that it cannot be right for a partisian official to be in charge of the voting. Even if Mr Blackwell or his counterpart in Florida in 2000, Katharine Harris, didn’t break any rules they would not be doing their jobs as top officials in Bush’s election campaigns if they didn’t push the rules to their limits in order to favour their own candidate. It just does not make any sense for folks, Republican or Democrat, with divided loyalties – ensuring the voting is fair and ensuring their boy wins – to be in charge of the voting process that decides who wins.
The other key lesson is that the information technology on its own does not constitute the whole information system; and the system can fail not just through failures in the technology.
(PS William the software filters are blacklisting my blog url again so I’ve left it out this time)
Well I’ve just come back from speaking on a panel at the WOTE 2006 conference in Cambridge. This conference was packed with bright-eyed cryptographers and technologists *gagging* to bring e-voting to the world.
I (along with Ian Brown) tried to convince them that there were better things to spend our time and money on but with so many careers and grants dependent on e-voting they weren’t very receptive.
e-voting is great for ballots in widely dispersed organisations such as Building Societies, where there is very little risk that voters will be coerced, and the results are not really vital.
e-voting is a very bad idea for national or local government elections: No amount of technology can prevent coercion or corruption.
In any case, accepting the inconvenience of voting physically is the bare minimum qualification for the privilege of having a vote.
(Written by someone with a “permanent” postal vote!)
Remind me again:
- Is this the democratic system which is being forced on countries around the world – at gun-point?
- Is this the democratic system whose defence by an “ever vigilant free press,” justifies the media’s other excesses?
- In exactly what way would an elected president be better than our Monarchy?