[E-voting] press release

[Margaret McGaley]

The latest draft of the press release is below. I'd like to release it 
today. What time should I send it, and who would be willing to be listed 
as a contact?

Margaret


Irish Citizens for Trustworthy Evoting (ICTE) today welcomed the release 
of the
Commission on Electronic Voting's second report on the secrecy and 
accuracy of
the Nedap/Powervote e-voting system. "We are satisfied that this report
vindicates our concerns about this e-voting system, particularly the 
need for a
voter verified paper audit trail (p153,4) and the need to entirely 
replace the
vote-management section of the system (p14)" said Margaret McGaley,
spokesperson for ICTE.

In response to Minister Roche's determination to continue with the 
introduction
of this system, Ms McGaley highlighted the expense the necessary 
modifications
would entail. "We should not decide to use this system without doing a full
cost-benefit analysis both for the system as a whole, and from this 
point on.
The changes laid out by the commission are extensive. They will require a
significant investment of both time and money to implement, and we need 
to ask
if this system is worth it. The €60 million that has been spent to date 
is gone
and the futher investment of several years, and millions of euro, will not
bring it back."

"We are particularly happy to see, on page 153 and 154, that the commission
have explicitly stated that the paper system is superior to the chosen 
system
because the latter does not provide a voter verified paper audit trail." 
said
Ms McGaley. ICTE maintains that no electronic voting system can be 
trustworthy
unless it includes a paper-based voter verified audit trail (VVAT), a view
shared by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Irish 
Computer
Society (ICS). According to Fergal Daly of ICTE: "After repeated failures of
electronic voting systems, many states in the US are enacting laws mandating
VVAT. We should learn from their mistakes rather than repeating them."