h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Tomorrow the French elections will take place.

Traditionally, you vote by slipping an envelope containing your voting bulletin into a voting box. In the evening people (anybody who wants is allowed to) gather in the voting office, open the envelopes, count the votes for each candidates and get a score for each of these.

Tomorrow though a new voting scheme will be introduced in some (about 2%, I think) voting offices: the electronic voting machine. You input the name of the candidate you support in the machine and it counts votes automatically.

You won't have a choice. That's the electronic box or nothing.

I personally believe is is easier to tamper with a piece of electronic apparatus (with this one at least) than with a large amount of people from various political sides counting pieces of papers in a room.

Considering that one of the candidates is a Big Brother Award laureate, I feel slightly uneasy about having to use this voting system. I think the traditional system is more reliable and less open to, um, abuse. Am I being old-fashioned or what? (Apparently some people will actually rather avoid going to vote rather than taking the risk of seeing their vote go to the wrong person!)

That doesn´t sound good. Who made the machines, the same company that made the ones used in the US?

I don't think it's old fashioned. The technology is not proven and there are very good security reasons for thinking they're a bad idea. Do you know if the French system has a paper trail or not? That is, does it print out a copy of your vote (which you can see) so that if the result is contested it can all be audited? That's one of the main objections to these systems.

Can they track each vote back to the voter you mean? Like they can here, should they be of a mind to.

Not necessarily. I'm a bit in two minds about that actually, but that's a separate discussion.

I just mean that if they printed out a copy of your vote, which you could look at and place in a box which was kept securely, you could have the good points of electronic voting (a quick result without manual counting), without the bad points (that they're easily rigged, because you'd need to physically get hold of and fake new paper printouts as well).

I am inherently 'uneasy' about a change away from the ballot box, and counted bits of paper. In all other walks of life I embrace electronic banking, and booking flights and holidays by computer. But voting? No.

I understand that there is a problem in getting folk to vote at all, but Postal votes and machines ( unless auditable ) leave me dubious. We need to look at alternative ways to persuade folk to get of their bums. Making the whole process too easy may produce a result we don't like!

Novo

I heard some politician suggesting voting by SMS.

This article may be of interest:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/24/voting_france/

There's some astute comments on that Reg article, particularly wrt the need for "universal comprehensibility" as a pre-requisite for engaging the electorate in the democratic process. Indeed, I've heard that credibly used as a counter-argument to some of the otherwise "more democratic" voting systems - certain kinds of proportional representation and preferential voting make it quite hard to intuitively see where your vote has gone, as it were.

My friend did a Law degree dissertation (in German) on the problems of electronic voting, and is frequently exhorting me to read more of http://blackboxvoting.org/ the name of which sums it up perfectly - if you can't see, even potentially, what's going on inside the process, people could make up pretty much any result they liked. I mean, who here hasn't thought on hearing a result "but how could that many people *possibly* have voted for..."



If we want higher turnouts, and more volunteers to count the votes (as one Reg commenter pointed out) the thing that needs fixing is not the ballot boxes, but the politics.

At risk of getting told off by the BBC for talking current elections, I have to share today's piece of Local Electioneering: below half a page of "local actions" which don't require them to be elected at all, one party describes the other party as being "slammed for negative tactics"; quite apart from the space over the page spent slating their opponents' tax policies, does that headline not strike you as a little, well, negative?

Interesting news item on BBC this morning, following link is from news page,

<< http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6614067.stm>>

A bit surprisng in terms of scale, and directly relates to previous discussions. One wonders how many of the 20,000 were 'non-existent', and which party got their 'votes'

According to R4 News Northern Ireland has resolved the problem by requiring 3 'identifiers' when registering for a postal vote, but checking and validating these must tie up as many people who would normally count the ballot slips?

Novo

The article [1] is a study made in the Netherlands about the voting machines.

And no, Dogster, they don't print out a copy of our vote. You just have to trust the machine. Just for record: in my hometown (Reims ) the city hall has admitted that there was a discrepancy of 281 units between the amount of people who signed the voting book (after you vote you have to sign somewhere in a big book) and the number of votes registered by the machines. However the city is allowed to keep using the electronic voting devices. The mind boggles.


[1] R. Gonggrijp, W.-J. Hengeveld et al: Nedap/Groenendaal ES3B voting computer: a security analysis.

http://www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/images/9/91/Es3b-en.pdf