Election media blackout starts at 2pm tomorrow!

mike65

What happened to getting 24 hours of clear air? I just heard Sean O'Rourke on RTE say they'll still be banging on until Thursday 2pm.

Apogee

Somebody, somewhere figured that we hadn't listened to enough lies and fawning bullsh*t over the past several weeks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa6U-K24BY0

BrianD

They changed the rules this year that you can discuss the elections on-air until 2pm the previous days.

Info here: http://www.bai.ie/about_news_art028.html

Of course if your a newspaper or online you can keep going as is.

icdg

The moratorium is a relic in the days of the internet. It started as an internal RTÉ directive that suddenly became word of God when the IRTC was set up. And God would be the only person who could help any commercial broadcaster found breaking the moratorium.

Its nonsense. It only applies to RTÉ, TG4, and BAI programme contractors, and only on conventional linear platforms. It doesn't apply on the internet, which is where a growing number of people are consuming their media. It never applied to newspapers. And you can't censor real life...

I'd abolish it, or maybe limit it to its UK incarantion, which only applies to the day of the election itself. The decision to roll it back these year indicates that the BAI are certainly looking in that direction and I wouldn't be surprised if this is the last general election in which it features.

mike65

Pity

Sam Russell

I think the moritorium should apply to opinion polls from the declaration of the election polls closing. Polls could be taken but not published. They deffinitely have a bandwaggon effect and so effect the result. Also they become 'News' of their own making. It is cheap and lazy journalism to comission a poll and then talk about it endlessly.

Pity we do not have electronic counting so we do not have to listen to all these 'early tallies', which is just someone looking at the ballot boxes being tipped onto a table and guessing how the votes are cast.

watty

No-one has figured how to do Electronic voting safely. Much harder to scam paper voting and it is it's own audit trail.

Electronic votes only work safely for a single location, simultaneous live vote, like in a meeting. Even then to "PROVE" it's tamper proof, bug free and have secure audit is amazingly hard.

We don't want an electoral system that's less reliable, honest, transparent and secure than many TV program premium phone in scams.

Even Electronic counting is tricky.

Sam Russell

The Lotto works twice a week with a system very like voting. No-one has managed to fool it with a fake ticket yet.

The mistake made with electronic voting was to concentrate on the hardware, and not the system or the software. Just as with DTT not concentrating on the system but instead of the Pay-TV element. If they pushed ahead to get up and running, the rest would sort itself out.

BrianD

watty wrote: »

No-one has figured how to do Electronic voting safely. Much harder to scam paper voting and it is it's own audit trail.

Electronic votes only work safely for a single location, simultaneous live vote, like in a meeting. Even then to "PROVE" it's tamper proof, bug free and have secure audit is amazingly hard.

We don't want an electoral system that's less reliable, honest, transparent and secure than many TV program premium phone in scams.

Even Electronic counting is tricky.

Couldn't agree less. We have a perfectly good system in storage.

It wasn't removed because of security scares. It went for one reason only, nobody liked the way that the result where Nora Owens lost her seat was announced. So all the busybodies that are associated with the voting process and love the event of tallies, counting and wasting time examining spoilt votes and decided tradition was a better option.

There a re plenty of countries where the paper and pen system is corrupted. If a party or organisation wants to rig an election they will.

Sam Russell

BrianD wrote: »

Couldn't agree less. We have a perfectly good system in storage.

It wasn't removed because of security scares. It went for one reason only, nobody liked the way that the result where Nora Owens lost her seat was announced. So all the busybodies that are associated with the voting process and love the event of tallies, counting and wasting time examining spoilt votes and decided tradition was a better option.

There a re plenty of countries where the paper and pen system is corrupted. If a party or organisation wants to rig an election they will.

This is off topic, but the main problem with the system chosen was that the software was written by people who did not understand our STV system, and that they retained ownership of the software. The value of the product was in the software, not the over-priced obsolete ageing hardware. The boards.ie software was brilliant, and would be a pleasure to use for most people - particularly on a touch screen.

The hardware should have been rented for each election, and been returned afterwards. Or maybe, even donated to local schools, or even sposored by high-tech companies. But that was when we were the richest country in the world, with the highest paid politicians in the world. (We still have those politicians - and they now have the highest pensions in the world).

BrianD

Sam Russell wrote: »

This is off topic, but the main problem with the system chosen was that the software was written by people who did not understand our STV system, and that they retained ownership of the software. The value of the product was in the software, not the over-priced obsolete ageing hardware. The boards.ie software was brilliant, and would be a pleasure to use for most people - particularly on a touch screen.

The hardware should have been rented for each election, and been returned afterwards. Or maybe, even donated to local schools, or even sposored by high-tech companies. But that was when we were the richest country in the world, with the highest paid politicians in the world. (We still have those politicians - and they now have the highest pensions in the world).

I honestly don't recall there being a problem with the software for these machines. They were used in Meath and Dublin West on a trial basis. I do recall the big let down being that there was no formal way of making the announcement and showing how the wizardy worked. The decorum. Consequently grown men had no idea when to raise another grown man onto their shoulders and bounce him up and down.

The boards.ie voting experiment was great and the interface a joy to use. I have one reservation - the inclusion of a 'spoil vote' button. Completely wrong and unnecessary in my view as you can't spoil an electronic vote.

watty

A spoilt vote is part of the democratic process.
To put the record straight on the evoting:

1) The software on those machines can't be proved to be correct
2) There is no proper audit trail for votes
3) The software and machine is not secure and tampering / changing the actual program would only be detected by offline byte by byte file comparison with a known "good" one.

You can't sacrifice Transparency, Security, Correctness for convienience.

Sam Russell

BrianD wrote: »

I honestly don't recall there being a problem with the software for these machines.

The problem with the software was that it was owned by a Dutch company. The source code was owned by them, any modifications would have to be written by them. The software should have been written by an Irish entity, and owned by the Government.

The second problem was the absence of any validation trail. If the ballot paper was printed out and kept for verification, then that would have been OK.

The third problem was tying the whole system to proprietry hardware that was already obsolete.

If an open source, non-proprietry, approach had been taken then it would have worked. Paper systems are also open to abuse - just look to Mugabe and ballot boxes stuffed with fake votes.

Someone made a lot of money out of a failed enterprise. Oh, I just realised that also applies to Anglo and a few other recent little frollicks.

BrianD

watty wrote: »

A spoilt vote is part of the democratic process.
To put the record straight on the evoting:

1) The software on those machines can't be proved to be correct
2) There is no proper audit trail for votes
3) The software and machine is not secure and tampering / changing the actual program would only be detected by offline byte by byte file comparison with a known "good" one.

You can't sacrifice Transparency, Security, Correctness for convienience.

Watty, I'm stunned. How on earth can you even suggest that a 'spoilt' vote is a part of the democratic process.

It isn't. Fact. There is no democratic right to spoil a vote other than under the current pencil and paper system you can and under the secrecy of the ballot afforded by the constitution no one knows what you marked on your vote.

From a purely logical vote an election is not a referendum, therefore you vote for something and not against. Spoiled votes are removed from the valid poll and therefore have zero impact. There's reporting done on whether a spoiled vote was some sort of protest, a genuine error or lacked the ability to fill in the form. Anybody who is unhappy with the range of candidates offered is best advised to stay at home.

As it happens academic research indicates that the majority of spoiled votes are actually genuine errors and not any form of protest. On average less than 1% of votes of the total poll in recent elections are spoiled.

To be frank, my view is that it is undemocratic to spoil a vote or suggest that it has some validity.

The problem with e-voting is that the detractors focused on hypotheticals that they refused to apply to the current system - audit trails, can it be proved to be safe, yada, yada. While last night we had 4 vote centres empty overnight and a couple of votes separating some candidates. You mean to tell me that's safe, secure and accountable and out of reach of somebody who might seek to corrupt the process?

Bring back the e-voting machines!

BrianD

Sam Russell wrote: »

The problem with the software was that it was owned by a Dutch company. The source code was owned by them, any modifications would have to be written by them. The software should have been written by an Irish entity, and owned by the Government.

I do accept your point that it would be the best option to have the software Irish designed and owned.

The second problem was the absence of any validation trail. If the ballot paper was printed out and kept for verification, then that would have been OK.

This would potentially remove the secrecy of the ballot. If this was required why aren't the current ballot papers duplicate books?

The third problem was tying the whole system to proprietry hardware that was already obsolete.

How are they obsolete when they were designed to do the one purpose? That purpose hasn't changed.

If an open source, non-proprietry, approach had been taken then it would have worked. Paper systems are also open to abuse - just look to Mugabe and ballot boxes stuffed with fake votes.

The general public perception is that open source is not as secure as proprietry systems. This is untrue in many case but nonetheless the public perception.

Someone made a lot of money out of a failed enterprise. Oh, I just realised that also applies to Anglo and a few other recent little frollicks.

Some things don't change with technology!

Sam Russell

BrianD wrote: »

This would potentially remove the secrecy of the ballot. If this was required why aren't the current ballot papers duplicate books?

I would think that a print of the ballot paper would contain no more information than is currently on the existing ballot paper, but it could include an encrypted hashed code for validation.

How are they obsolete when they were designed to do the one purpose? That purpose hasn't changed.

They are obsolete because they used small-sized character-based screens that are subject to poor connections. They also used keyboards that would be subject to bad contacts if stored for a long period (as they have been).

The general public perception is that open source is not as secure as proprietry systems. This is untrue in many case but nonetheless the public perception.

The whole benefit of having, say, an Irish University Politics Dept. looking at overseeing the software and data integrity, is that whole system is under scutiny. Political parties could co-operate to ensure the system is open and fair, as they do with the current counting system.

icdg

Okay guys, discuss electronic voting in Politics.