Minister Martin Cullen's pension

So do I. Not as if we are a massive Country of 100 million people.

Minister Cullen was a waste of space as Minister. Can't think of one achievement that he can stand over. Did nothing in transport. Did nothing in Sport and Tourism. Did nothing in social affairs and did nothing in environment and local government. Sorry about his health but not sorry he has gone.
 
Sunny said:
So do I. Not as if we are a massive Country of 100 million people.

Minister Cullen was a waste of space as Minister. Can't think of one achievement that he can stand over. Did nothing in transport. Did nothing in Sport and Tourism. Did nothing in social affairs and did nothing in environment and local government. Sorry about his health but not sorry he has gone.
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Agreee 100%
 
I think it's Pat Leahy in his book "Showtime" where there's an interesting take on what happened here. (One of the recent barrage of politcal/recession books anyway.)

The government had got to a point where they'd done tests, were ready to put in the order for the machines, but it was becoming clear there were politically more and more reasons to not go ahead. Internationally limitations of e-voting were becoming clearer as more countries were investigating their use.

Now what normally happens in a case like this is are delaying tactics, reports asked for, commissions launched, then a quiet shelving until the appropriate juncture.

However what happened according to the book was the senior civil servants went ahead and signed the contracts - as was planned but without consulting the minister - who would have kicked in the delaying tactics.

Now the civil servants involved were doing their job, however the minister was allegedly annoyed since there'd be an expectation that at the levels of staff involved they'd be aware of political sensitivities and would have expected to have been made aware he was about to be backed into a corner.

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In defense of e-voting potentially it could save money (if you assume every security and other issue was resolved) as you'd have no need to pay staff to count votes. Also had Ireland managed to do it right and more importantly develop the technology itself we potentially could have had a new mini-industry reselling the technology to other governments.
 
ashambles said:
The government had got to a point where they'd done tests, were ready to put in the order for the machines, but it was becoming clear there were politically more and more reasons to not go ahead. Internationally limitations of e-voting were becoming clearer as more countries were investigating their use.
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This wasn't a case of playing politics. It was a case of it being clear that the chosen system was just not going to work, and any purchase was going to be a waste of money.

ashambles said:
However what happened according to the book was the senior civil servants went ahead and signed the contracts - as was planned but without consulting the minister - who would have kicked in the delaying tactics.

Now the civil servants involved were doing their job, however the minister was allegedly annoyed since there'd be an expectation that at the levels of staff involved they'd be aware of political sensitivities and would have expected to have been made aware he was about to be backed into a corner.
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It is up to the Minister (like any Director of any organisation) to ensure that appropriate procedures and limits were in place about who gets to sign contracts and place orders.

And even if the contract were signed without his direct involvement, he could have had the guts/brains to back out/cancel/negotiate out of the contract immediately, and incur a minimum penalty instead of incurring the huge waste that followed.
ashambles said:
In defense of e-voting potentially it could save money (if you assume every security and other issue was resolved) as you'd have no need to pay staff to count votes.
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Not true. You need a control mechanism to ensure that only people who have been checked in at the register get to vote. So you need (as was the case with Nedap machines) one person for each machine to enable it for each voter. This additional manpower (7,000 man-days) exceeds the manpower required for the count.
 
I always thought Noel Dempsey was responsible for the e-voting machines.

That's why Meath was one of 3 constituencies which used the machines in the 2002 General Election.
 
Complainer said:
Quicker - So you reckon it is worth a state investment of €50m approx to have results on a Friday night instead of a Saturday night? What is the difference? Why is 'quicker' important here?

More accurate - What problems do we have with the accuracy of the current system (where every vote is counted in public scrutiny, with a pile of people checking the work of the counters)?
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I'll agree it's not worth €50m.

I still believe the right thing would be that everyone's vote should be capable of being recorded electronically with an appropriate audit trail established.

But I'd have no problem waiting until it's cost efficient. Maybe that will never happen due to the infrequency of elections and the speed at which technoolgy becomes obsolete
 
DB74 said:
I always thought Noel Dempsey was responsible for the e-voting machines.

That's why Meath was one of 3 constituencies which used the machines in the 2002 General Election.
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Dempsey initiated the project and ran the pilots in 2002. So the failures in publishing the full results of the initial tests and the pilots falls to him.

He then moved from Environment to Transport, so Cullen picked up the ball, and ran ahead, spending €50m of our money on a pile of junk.

DerKaiser said:
I'll agree it's not worth €50m.

I still believe the right thing would be that everyone's vote should be capable of being recorded electronically with an appropriate audit trail established.
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But this still brings us back to the 'why?' question.
 
DerKaiser said:
Efficiency, it's pretty cool what you can do in a few seconds with a computer compared to what takes hours for hundreds of people to do.
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But it is not more effecient. The saving on manpower for the count is outweighed by the extra manpower needed to control access to the machines during voting.

And as for 'cool', that brings us back to the 'toys for boys' arguement - hardly a good reason for state investment.
 
Complainer said:
But it is not more effecient. The saving on manpower for the count is outweighed by the extra manpower needed to control access to the machines during voting.
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I don't know what system you have in mind. I'm sure there's efficient ways it could be done e.g. pin numbers or bar codes.

There's no way you can say we cannot design an efficient electronic voting system.

It's one thing to say we have not been able to implement one but it's a bit dogmatic to rule out the possibility of a cheap reliable electronic voting system ever being implemented.
 
But it's not dogmatic to say 'we should have eVoting' when you have no clear vision of how this is going to work and what (if any) benefits would arise?

Come on man - give us the business case first, then come to your conclusion.
 
Complainer said:
But it's not dogmatic to say 'we should have eVoting' when you have no clear vision of how this is going to work and what (if any) benefits would arise?

Come on man - give us the business case first, then come to your conclusion.
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Why are you trying to bait me? You want me to design a system myself? I've already overcome one of the problems you've preconceived by limiting access based on barcodes (I'm no techie).

Electronically recorded votes could cut out the type of errors we regularly see in certain piles of votes being placed in the wrong place.

The use of sampling in distributing surplus is not satisfactory.

I'm pretty young but I can remember one instance of recounts swinging 3 different ways.

If you think that we'll never beat the pencil and paper that's your opinion.

I'm pretty convinced, however, the current obstacles of cost, audit trail, etc are well capable of being overcome
 
DerKaiser said:
I've already overcome one of the problems you've preconceived by limiting access based on barcodes (I'm no techie).
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I've no idea what you're proposing here. Please explain it in non-technical terms. What is the barcode for? Who issues it? Who uses it? What does it identify?
 
Complainer said:
I've no idea what you're proposing here. Please explain it in non-technical terms. What is the barcode for? Who issues it? Who uses it? What does it identify?
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A unique pin or barcode could be used to ensure each person can only vote once. Polling cards could be issued with it. It is used for concert tickets, etc.

I've already said I'm not designing a system here. And I know you will keep antagonising me because of this.

Like I said you can believe what you want in terms of what can be achieved in the future.

Here's some reading for you, I have no further comment other than my genuine surprise that people think the notion of e-voting is preposterous

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting
 
DerKaiser said:
A unique pin or barcode could be used to ensure each person can only vote once. Polling cards could be issued with it. It is used for concert tickets, etc.

I've already said I'm not designing a system here. And I know you will keep antagonising me because of this.

Like I said you can believe what you want in terms of what can be achieved in the future.

Here's some reading for you, I have no further comment other than my genuine surprise that people think the notion of e-voting is preposterous

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting
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Thanks for the wikipedia link. Having spent quite a lot of time researching this issue over the past 10 years, I didn't really learn a lot new from it.

So let's get back to the barcode proposal. I'm still now clear on how this is supposed to work. Is this intended to replace the current checks against the electoral register that occur at the polling station? If so, there are a number of problems with this.

First of all, it is trivial to copy a barcode or a PIN. Ticketmaster don't worry about letting the first ticketholder to arrive in, and blocking anyone else who comes along with the same barcode. But that's not really an option for voting. It would also require something like 20,000 voting machines (compared to the 7,000 that Minister Cullen bought for us), so you have a huge extra cost to handle. But the main problem, is that this breaks the anonymous basis of our voting system. With your barcode or PIN, you have now provided a direct link between the voter and their vote. Not clever.

Just to be clear, I've never suggested that eVoting can't work. What I've said is that there is no business case for implementing eVoting in Ireland.
 
Complainer said:
Just to be clear, I've never suggested that eVoting can't work. What I've said is that there is no business case for implementing eVoting in Ireland.
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We must be at odds with each other then.

I agreed about 6 posts back there didn't appear to be a business case at the moment based on the €50m cost of the machines.

You replied to this by asking me why I believed e-voting would be desirable and I've engaged with you on this basis.
 
DerKaiser said:
You replied to this by asking me why I believed e-voting would be desirable and I've engaged with you on this basis.
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Indeed, and I've been pointing out the gaping holes in your touching aspiration for 'efficiency' - the gains are just not there.
 
Complainer said:
Indeed, and I've been pointing out the gaping holes in your touching aspiration for 'efficiency' - the gains are just not there.
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You're doing it again.

You asked me what merit I saw in e-voting having accepted it wasn't cost efficient at the moment.

I gave a number of reasons which you have not disputed.

If an efficient means of e-voting cannot be achieved why has there been so much research and work into it across the world?

My guess is that some country (probably one with a much larger population where the business case is much more compelling) will eventually develop a really clever system which could be efficiently adopted here and I don't apologise for keeping an open mind on this.
 
Saying 'we should have eVoting' is not 'keeping an open mind'. It is the exact opposite of an open mind.
 
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