Originally found in the ACM TechNews of Wednesday July 28, 2004.
"In Most of Europe, Electronic Voting Loses Out to Paper Ballots" Dow Jones Newswires (07/26/04); Miller, John
European citizens and governments generally prefer traditional paper-based voting because of unresolved reliability and security issues surrounding electronic voting. The EU Commission will not endorse e-voting, while major e-voting deployments in Ireland and the United Kingdom were terminated or heavily criticized because of security or technical lapses. EU Commissioner Erkki Liikanen doubts that a total pan-European adoption of e-voting will ever come about because of concerns with "technical" problems and "social acceptability." E-voting critics point out that a paper ballot offers an audit trail that e-voting lacks, and cite e-voting's vulnerability to hackers and computer bugs as additional shortcomings. Fueling the arguments of paper ballot supporters are incidents such as a 2003 Belgian election in which almost 4,100 extra votes for Maria Vindevoghel's Communist Party were recorded in a precinct of Brussels due to a malfunction triggered by a cosmic ray. But glitches such as this have not dissuaded e-voting's proponents, as Belgian citizens are generally satisfied with e-voting, while the Dutch have been voting electronically for over three decades. "It doesn't bother anybody because we're used to it," explains Judich Sleider of the Dutch Ministry of the Interior. The government of Ireland planned to adopt the Dutch e-voting system by purchasing 7,000 machines from Nedap in a move the Irish Prime Minister touted as symbolic of the country's modernization, but the project was scrapped before the June election when an independent commission found that the devices had not undergone rigorous testing for bugs or hacker attacks. Nevertheless, the Irish government has requested a follow-up assessment by the commission, and plans to use e-voting for the 2006 general elections.