A group of computer hackers has warned the Government that the e-voting system it bought from a Dutch firm is flawed and should be sent back to The Netherlands.
The We Do Not Trust Voting Computers Foundation, made the claim after revealing on television how similar e-voting machines used in The Netherlands could be hacked into to enable electoral fraud. The machines, which are both manufactured by Dutch firm Nedap, use a postage stamp-sized microchip to count people's votes.
In a documentary aired just six weeks before the Dutch general election, the hackers showed how they had managed to reprogramme the e-voting terminals to steal votes from particular candidates in an election. They also reprogrammed the machines to transform them into simple chess computers that could play games with the hackers.
After a demonstration for the media yesterday in The Hague, hacker Maurice Wessling told The Irish Times it took just minutes to open a machine and insert a specially programmed replacement chip that would enable votes to be stolen in an election.
He said some of the technical data that the hackers had used to breach the security of the Dutch e-voting machines had been obtained from a report published by the Irish Commission on Electronic Voting, which analysed the integrity of the Nedap machines.
"The Irish Government would be very wise not to use these machines in an election. Its commission on electronic voting has already found serious problems with the machines in e-voting Ireland," said Mr Wessling. "In fact, the best thing your Government could do is send the machines back to The Netherlands." The Government is still evaluating whether to use the e-voting machines it purchased several years ago from Nedap. Its e-voting policy has cost taxpayers more than €50 million and has only been used on a test basis so far.
The television documentary also revealed that a single key opens all the 8,000 e-voting machines in The Netherlands and highlighted weaknesses in the physical security measures in place at a Rotterdam warehouse where some of the e-voting machines are stored. The hackers group said it would launch a legal suit against the Dutch government if it did not take account of the findings and scrap e-voting in the upcoming elections.
The claims were rejected last night by Nedap. It said the fact that replacement chips could be inserted into the machines didn't prove anything as this could be done with any computer system.
The integrity of elections depended on having the right security procedures and guarantees in place to protect either e-voting machines or ballot boxes containing paper votes in elections, according to Matthijs Schippers, marketing group manager of electoral systems for Nedap.
He said the fact that it took a team of nine programmers to create the replacement chip to insert into the e-voting machines proved the integrity of the system.
A spokeswoman for the Dutch government said it had no plans to abandon e-voting in the upcoming election.
Colm MacCarthaigh, of Irish Citizens for Trustworthy E-voting, said: "The attack presented by the Dutch group would not need significant modification to run on the Irish systems. The machines use the same construction and components, and differ only in relatively minor aspects."