[E-voting] DRAFT: letter to the Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programme

[A.J.Delaney at brighton.ac.uk]

Colm,
On Sat, 2009-02-14 at 12:16 +0000, Colm MacCárthaigh wrote:
> I have a draft letter to the Special Group on Public Service Numbers
> and Expenditure Programme (an bord snip) up at;
> 
> http://www.stdlib.net/~colmmacc/letter-to-pubcom.pdf
> 
> Comments Welcome :-)
The letter is a-political and consists entirely of facts in the public
domain.  This is consistent with previous ICTE press-releases.

I have a small issue with the phrase "considerable contention" (point 2
on page 2).  I think you're using the computer science definition of
contention and am unsure that a non-computer science reader would
understand it.  I suggest that you change this to 

"As such, were e-voting to be trialled in Ireland as originally planned,
considerable delays may have occurred causing significant queuing at
polling stations.  Such a decrease in quality of service would
necessitating the purchase of even more e-voting machines."

This restatement is longer than the original, so I trust you to make a
judgement call.

Furthermore, I don't see why we refer to the "proposed system" (point 3
on page 2).  From my understanding there is no "proposed" system; there
is simply the paper system and the NEDAP system.  So for example;
"In fact the proposed system probably would have decreased accessibility
for the sight-impaired (owing to the small LCD screen)."
might be changed to 
"In fact the NEDAP system may have decreased accessibility for the
sight-impaired (owing to the small LCD screen)."
Also note that I changed "probably would" to "may", further underling
the necessity of performing a cost/benefit analysis.

Again, I trust your personal judgement on this issue.

--
Aidan Delaney
Senior Lecturer
School of Computing, Mathematical and Information Sciences
University of Brighton