Dutch ban e-voting

by Steven Freeman 6/1/2008 8:16:00 PM

Dutch ban voting computers over eavesdropping fear

Back to basics

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/20/dutch_ban_on_voting_computers/

By Jan Libbenga 20 May, 2008

The risk of eavesdropping has driven the Dutch government to ban electronic voting computers from future elections.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs says that the development of safer voting computers has "insufficient added value over voting by paper and pencil". Dutch election officials will return to using paper ballots instead.

The decision is a victory for the obliquely-named Dutch We Don't Trust Voting Computers Foundation, which in the past demonstrated that many Dutch e-voting machines could be easily intercepted from 20 to 30 metres away.

Dutch intelligence service AIVD tested over 1200 Sdu e-voting machines in October, and deemed them totally unreliable. The radio signals used by the computers to record votes could be intercepted without difficulty. Minister for Administrative Reform Atzo Nicolai immediately withdrew the permit for the use of the computers in the provincial elections in March 2008.

The Dutch government had decided last year to pull the plug on its e-voting venture, citing the lack of a paper trail as its biggest shortcoming. With no automated paper counting solution deployed, the Dutch will have to revert back to the humble pencil.

A group of experts headed by professor Bart Jacobs told Dutch site Webwereld that "even with meticulous testing it would have been almost impossible to safeguard printers against eavesdropping".

Voting machine manufacturer Nedap says it is disappointed by the decision. "It would have been technically possible to prevent eavesdropping altogether," the company says. "And now that we return to paper voting, isn't there a risk voters can be filmed with webcams?"

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Comments

6/2/2008 12:14:05 PM

You've got to read beyond the headline.

Here's a different version of the story with some important details missing from the above account

-- which EI advocates, eager for a win, seem to have entirely overlooked.

Dutch government bans electronic voting

Risk of electronic eavesdropping cited as the reason. Nation returns to paper and pencil. Rop Gonggrijp who spearheaded the move away from e-voting, cites other nations that are demanding verifiable election results.
http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/link.php?id=59711

To borrow a phrase from Larry David, "Curb your enthusiasm."

If you read the [above] article, you will see that "Instead of electronic voting machines, the nation will now shift focus to electronic vote counting."

Dutch E-voting opponents won this claimed victory by demonstrating that electronic emissions from the voting machines could be picked up and read by simple handheld devices in the local vicinity of the voting booths, thus erasing the secrecy of the voters' ballot choices.
The opponents have a point there, certainly, but they seem oblivious to the potential to falsify votes that are tabulated electronically.

Pencil and paper to mark the vote; fine. But then, shift to a bar-code scanner and some other unidentified "device" to electronically tabulate the results?

Right back where we started.

The reporting in this news story is very thin.

Maybe the proposed Dutch system isn't quite as simplistically braindead as it appears in this press account.

That the hand-marked votes are read aloud by a second human counter, is good.

But then, they propose to nullify the public verification system of hand-marked, read-aloud, paper ballot results by recording vote totals using some unspecified "electronic vote counting" methodology that employs barcodes and some additional, unidentified "special counting-device" which apparently is also electronic.

If by "electronic vote counting" they meant, an adding machine, or a pocket calculator, wouldn't they just say that?
"Electronic" in voting contexts is usually an imprecise obfuscation that actually means, "software-mediated computing process."

Here's another question the story raises but doesn't answer: How are those bar codes getting on the ballot, if the ballot choices are hand-marked by the voter?

Bar codes are not readable by humans. So how are bar codes to be be marked on those "hand-marked ballots," and what's in those codes?

If this were truly an end-to-end non-computerized vote casting and counting system the Dutch are proposing, there would be no place in it at all for data non-readable by humans.

--Dan Ashby
Election Defense Alliance