The Commission on Electronic Voting has restated its criticism of the €50 million electronic voting system that was dropped by the Government ahead of the local and European elections last June.
The commission moved yesterday to publish the technical studies from initial tests on the system, more than six months after its interim report led the then minister for the environment, Mr Cullen, to halt the roll-out of electronic voting.
The report appeared yesterday as pressure remained on Mr Cullen, now Minister for Transport, over the appointment of one of his closest political associates to a public relations job at Environment when he was minister in that Department.
The report repeated that the commission had not been in a position to satisfy itself as to the accuracy of the Nedap Powervote system, which it said was "effectively self-auditing".
It pointed out the "very high standards that must be applied to the testing of a vote recording and counting system". The level of testing carried out at the time of the interim report's appearance in April meant it was not possible to establish the trustworthiness and reliability of the system.
It said that further testing, including a full review of the system's source code, was required.
This followed from the need to establish a "very high degree of confidence" in systems for counting votes in elections.
Such confidence should be "far higher" than in many other applications of new technology, it said.
The commission acknowledged that the system had been used in pilot tests in previous Irish elections and eliminated many inadvertent voter errors and the need for subjective judgment by returning officers.
However, it restated the view that it was unable to recommend use of the system.
"Experts retained by the Commission found it very easy to bypass electronic security measures and gain complete control of the 'hardened PC', overwrite the software, and thereby, in theory, to gain complete control over the count in a given constituency."
While such PCs were the weakest link in the security of the proposed system, the commission said it was significant that there appeared to have been no systematic testing and certification of processes used to make the PCs safer for use in elections.
The commission is chaired by Mr Justice Matthew P. Smith, chairman of the Commission for Standards in Public Office, who recently announced his retirement from the High Court bench.
In a statement yesterday, the commission said it was seeking in its current work to build on the conclusions of the first report.
In doing this, it drew particular attention to the development of a programme for software assurance and system testing.
It said the Department of the Environment was establishing a programme of work to address specific recommendations in the first report. "The commission will also review and report on the Department's programme of work, once completed."
