“Scrap €52m e-voting system, says councillor”
October 22nd, 2006My E-Voting post from earlier this week, “The Continuing E-Voting Saga“, has been picked up by The Sunday Times, who have a piece on Page 7 today entitled “Scrap €52m e-voting system, says councillor“.
Mark Tighe rang me on Thursday evening to ask a few follow-up questions, but his piece revolves mainly around the post and the interview on Highland on Tuesday. For me, it’s a fairly simple story. I am unaware of any impartial, independent person who knows what they are talking about, who is willing to back using the system we have in any form for a future election.
The piece also has a contribution from Matthew Browne, sales director of Opt2Vote, the Derry-based company who have developed an E-Voting system, with input from researchers at Letterkenny IT, which would be a much more open, transparent, and valid way to hold an election here in Ireland.
I didn’t set out to cause a stir about E-Voting. I wanted to highlight that there was a local solution available to this problem. The problem is so major, and so important, that it’s impossible to highlight better solutions without mentioning what’s wrong with the existing system.
On a side note, it’s good to see journalists crediting items they read on blogs. Mark Tighe could just have easily ran this as a piece highlighting the Opt2Vote system, without mentioning me. Many blogs have had pieces lifted for news stories; in particular, Guido Fawkes constantly sees stories in the UK press that have been taken, uncredited, from his blog. Irish blogger RedMum recently saw a photograph taken from her website used in the “Metro” newspaper in Dublin, breaching her copyright. That issue has since been resolved.
I’ve disabled comments on this piece, to avoid duplication. If you want to comment on E-Voting, you can do so on the original post