[E-voting] Meeting with the Minister/Dept

[Catherine Ansbro]

Well done Colm, and best wishes to all three of you.

On the presentation, the last sentence on the last slide could be deleted 
or changed for a stronger "finish".

Also, someplace in the basic presentation should state the need for a 
mandatory audit of a significant percentage of the votes at every election 
as necessary to deter fraud.  (A "properly" hacked election would not 
necessarily be obvious.)  Maybe even of all the votes at each 
election.  There needs to be a strong deterrent to any would-be tamperers.

I hope you folks are keeping on top of the recent events in the USA.  I 
finally stopped posting about it here because of the lack of response.  But 
the range of evidence of fraud is mounting and is leading to preparations 
for a wide range of legal actions.  (And the statistical work that some 
tried to attack subsequently held their own.)  Wake up ICTE!  The USA 
events are relevant for us here.

Also, do not underplay the opportunities for "insider jobs" when dealing 
with electronic voting, and the great vulnerability of the counting 
machines.  And the difficulty in providing genuinely secure storage, 
updating, repair and handling/transmission of all the components in an 
e-voting system.  The procedural oversight would be onerous (and 
impractical and expensive)--and could still be easily compromised by only 
one person.

That press release was really shocking, wasn't it.  It shows the 
government's position and we can take nothing for granted.

Does Joe have hope of getting a special meeting?  He sure deserves it.

All the best,

Catherine


At 14:00 17/01/2005 +0000, Colm MacCarthaigh wrote:

>The Meeting is still going ahead, as planned, tomorrow at 11am :)
>Attending will be myself, Margaret and Adrian.
>
>A long time ago when we were originally trying to get a meeting with
>Minister Cullen, we were working with Joe McCarthy, so we extended the
>invite to him also, but Joe is pressing for the honouring the commitment
>to him for real dialogue from the department.
>
>I've done a presentation on vvat, and it's at;
>
>         http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/vvat.pdf
>
>I'll be producing printed copies of the presentation as it is there, but
>the given presentation will have the obviously "wordy" slides spoken,
>with only the colourful blocky ones on-screen. I've simply amalgamated
>everything to make it easier to distribute.
>
>I'll probably change the slide background and so on and make it look
>better.
>
>In addition to this, I'm still working on a document to hand over, which
>can cover more than we can in a short meeting, and a full list of topics
>we hope to cover.
>
>--
>Colm MacCárthaigh                        Public Key: colm+pgp at stdlib.net
>
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