At What Cost electronic voting?

national | politics / elections | press release Tuesday February 10, 2004 06:18 by Andrew Ó Baoill - At What Cost? evote at funferal dot org

Campaign aims to enable grassroots action

At What Cost?' is a campaign against the introduction of electronic voting in Ireland. We make use of the opportunities provided by the internet to raise awareness of the issue and to provide tools and information that enable individuals to campaign on a local level.

Our goals are to:
- raise awareness of electronic voting, and the serious issues associated with it, amongst the public;
- provide resources online to support campaign activities and encourage and facilitate local action on this issue;
- co-ordinate mass action protesting electronic voting.

Voting is central to our democratic structures. Because of this, the concerns raised by computer scientists and others in relation to the need for a paper audit trail must be taken seriously - instead of being dismissed out of hand as the government is doing.

Additionally, there are dangers in adopting any system that will necessarily be dominated by experts, forcing lay persons to leave oversight of this democratic institution in the hands of these experts.

Finally, many of the claims made by the government do not stand up to scrutiny. They talk about cost effectiveness. No cost benefit analysis has been performed, and it now appears the system will be considerably more expensive than the manual system. They talk of ease of use. No usability tests have been performed and the system will not be accessible to the blind! Even the argument that the system will demonstrate that Ireland is on the cutting edge of technology (should our electoral process really be used as a PR gimmick?) are shown up by the fact that the counting software operates on a Windows 98 system and uses MS Access - which even Microsoft claims should not be used in such critical operations!

At What Cost will be issuing regular press updates. If you want to ensure that you receive these, let us know: evote@funferal.org

Members of the public who want to support the campaign, or who merely want to be informed of developments should register on the website.