e-vote, RIP

Two seemingly unconnected events in Florida and the Republic of Ireland seem to signal the end of the road for paperless touch-screen voting systems. First, Florida, leading a national trend to abandon such systems --

Gov. Charlie Crist announced plans on Thursday to abandon the touch-screen voting machines that many of Florida’s counties installed after the disputed 2000 presidential election. The state will instead adopt a system of casting paper ballots counted by scanning machines in time for the 2008 presidential election.

Voting experts said Florida’s move, coupled with new federal voting legislation expected to pass this year, could be the death knell for the paperless electronic touch-screen machines. If as expected the Florida Legislature approves the $32.5 million cost of the change, it would be the nation’s biggest repudiation yet of touch-screen voting, which was widely embraced after the 2000 recount as a state-of-the-art means of restoring confidence that every vote would count.

Ireland hasn't even gotten as far as a Florida 2000 fiasco in terms of something that would rationalize the government's determination to introduce touch-screen voting despite the lack of confidence of voters in it, and this certainly won't help: the company in charge of the stalled project seems to be playing card tricks with its assets (Irish Times, subs. req'd) --

The company that won the Government's €50 million contract to supply electronic voting machines, which will have to be upgraded before they can be used, has gone into voluntary liquidation.

Powervote Ireland Ltd has nearly €1.9 million in cash in the bank and €2.6 million worth of assets, according to its latest returns filed in the Companies Office up to September 30th, 2005. Last night the Department of the Environment insisted the liquidation would not affect its efforts to get the Powervote/ Nedap e-voting machines into use in the State, following the Commission on Electronic Voting's questioning of the security of its software.

In a statement the department said it had been advised by the company last September that it was about to carry out a "technical restructuring" of the Powervote group. This involved the transfer of all obligations and rights under the contract with the department from Powervote (Ireland) to Powervote Services.

Luckily the degree of incompetence around this project has been sufficient to prevent it from being up and running in time for the general election later this year.