NSW to expand e-voting

New South Wales is set to expand the footprint of electronic voting in its state election, due in 2015, with Spanish vendor Scytl reportedly on the brink of signing a new contract with the state government. Scytl's Java-based electoral software already has a footprint in NSW, since it formed the basis of the state's iVote …

[Anonymous Coward]

NSW

A State of corruption.

Started by the Rum Corps.

What could go wrong?

[deadlockvictim]

Madness

Since the revelations of the now exiled E. Snowden, I would have thought that it would be clear to all that what travels over the Internet can not be guaranteed to be untouched. Actually, it might be more proper to say that it can be guaranteed to have been «inspected» at least once. SSL has been broken.

Can guarantees can the government in NSW give that the votes cast will be the votes received? Why would big agencies stop at just deep-packet inspection when the technology to alter said packets is within their grasp. Who would know, anyway, if it were done?

Please feel free to post the XKCD link about the bug-report to God.

[Robert Grant]

System architecture

Parts needed:

1) ID/passport scanner, from an airport

2) An array of the candidates' names

3) Touch screen

4) No working USB ports

5) Big SSL certificate

6) Cable to connect to central MongoDB

Old rope, you say? I'll pay through the nose for that!

[A J Stiles]

Democracy is too important

Democracy is too important to automate.

The beauty of pencil, paper and ballot box is universal comprehensibility. Everyone can understand how the process works and what can go wrong. This means everyone is potentially an election scrutineer.

The more you complicate the paraphernalia used in an election, the fewer people to whom it is comprehensible. And if you use any proprietary technology at all (thereby elevating a corporation's "intellectual property" above the democratic process) then you have effectively blocked all scrutiny of the process. Furthermore, even if the specifications, blueprints, wiring diagrams and software listings for any voting machines are published, there is still no way in practice to verify that all the machines in use in an actual election correspond with the published data.

Everyone knows how pencil and paper work, how they can go wrong and how to minimise the probability of anything going wrong.. An election conducted using pencil and paper will never be stopped by a power or communications failure. And there is no way to tamper with a ballot paper once it has been placed in the box.

There is no such certainty with an electronic machine, which relies on making unverifiable copies at every stage. And adding a paper trail does not change this; it is always possible for the machine to record a vote for candidate A whilst issuing audit documents showing a vote for B.

Electronic voting does not solve any problems. It only creates new ones of its own. We always managed without it until now; and we neither need, nor want it.

[bep]

Re: Democracy is too important

I'm pretty much with you on this one, and as a NSW voter I have personal interest in this one, but unfortunately the electoral commission's loss of a small number of paper ballots from the last Senate election has only strengthened the arm of those pushing for electronic ballots. That loss has had an impact far out of proportion to the number of ballot papers lost, since they will have to run the whole election again. That's the price of democracy, I guess, but a lot of people can't be bothered to pay it and would much rather use their i-device of choice to pick their least-disliked pollie.

[Francis Boyle]

Shit

"Java-based electoral software" is a phrase that should never have reason to exist.

[flibbertigibbet]

And it works .... how?

As a citizen wishing to stay informed, I'm interested in how it works. Why should we trust it over the current system?

We already have other electronic voting systems, designed and implemented in Australia, that I know do work. (The one designed by the Victorian Electoral Commission.)

Who knows, the may work too. Or it may be another Diebold disaster. There is no way to know from this article.

(Paris because after reading the article, I'm left feeling like I don't have a clue.)

[Marking Time]

How do you know that what is printed out is what you entered?

[Steven Roper]

I don't like the name of the company

"Scytl" is a little too much like "Scytale" for my liking.

(For those familiar with the Dune-iverse, you may remember that Scytale was the name of a Face Dancer, and later a Tleilaxu Master, and both were evil, scheming manipulators...!)