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Part 5 – Accuracy and Secrecy of the System
5.2 Accuracy
As stated in Part 1 of this report, “accuracy” relates to matters concerning the demonstrable integrity and consistency of the methods for the gathering of the votes at polling stations, the methods for the translocation of the votes from polling stations to count centres, the process of disaggregating groups of votes for counting in different types of elections, and the methods for counting and distributing votes and allocating seats in each of the elections to take place in June 2004. Thus there is accuracy of the voting method and accuracy of the counting method to be considered, together with the accuracy of the systems for moving votes between different stages of the process.
As has already been noted in Part 4, in the context of collecting and counting votes in public elections, the degree of imperfection in these methods that can be tolerated is very low. It must also be expected that the degree o-f imperfection in an acceptable electronic voting system will be less than in the traditional paper voting system.
Benefits
On the basis of the work it has carried out, the Commission is of the view that the proposed system can deliver a higher level of accuracy than the traditional paper voting system in a number of important respects.
The proposed electronic system eliminates many inadvertent voter errors that clearly do occur in the traditional paper voting system. Such errors result in votes unintentionally being rendered invalid and the wishes of the voter concerned not being taken into account.
The proposed system also eliminates the need for subjective judgments by returning officers on votes of marginal validity, and the consequent possibility that different returning officers might have made different judgements about the same ballot.
Assuming that votes cast are recorded correctly and are transferred accurately to the count program, the proposed system can generate the same election result every time the votes are counted, which clearly does not always happen under the traditional paper voting system.
The proposed system could easily be programmed to eliminate the imprecision in selecting ballots for transfer during the distribution of surpluses. By transferring every transferable vote at a weighted value (“the Gregory method”), more accurate election results would be generated than under the current system, since the views of every relevant voter would be taken into account.
Such a change would require an amendment to the statutory rules for the counting of the votes at various types of elections. However, a policy decision was made when the system was commissioned to retain the existing method of selecting votes for transfer during surplus distribution.
Issues of Concern
The principal issues of concern identified by the Commission in relation to the accuracy of the proposed system largely follow from the Commission’s conclusions about testing.
The software version proposed for use at the forthcoming elections is not as yet finalised so it is impossible for anyone to certify its accuracy.
Furthermore, as regards the system as a whole, the issues set out in Part 4 in relation to the testing of the system make it impossible to determine its accuracy in the context of this report and the June elections.
Testing by the Commission has identified an error in the count software which could lead to incorrect distribution of surpluses. This undermines confidence in software development and testing and there is a possibility that further testing will uncover further software errors.
While eliminating the possibility of certain types of inadvertent voter error, the proposed system introduces the possibility of new types of error made by people unfamiliar with electronic voting. Public submissions were received by the Commission from people participating in the 2002 pilots who had made or observed such errors.
The results of the input-output test carried out by the Commission, involving the entry of 36,950 pre-determined votes onto 739 voting machines and a comparison of the outputs against the pre-determined inputs, suggests that the error rate attributable to human error in the use of the voting machine may be of significance in the context of postal and special votes which are cast manually by voters but which are then entered into voting machines by election officials.
A consequence of retaining the current imperfect method of determining surplus distributions (notwithstanding that the electronic system is ideally suited to handling a fully precise but more complex system of distribution) is that, although the system offers the possibility of printing out all the ballots cast at an election and therefore offers the possibility of a manual re-count, the current rules for the selection of the votes on the transfer of a surplus mean that if a manual re-count of an election were required (as in the case of an election petition), this can only be done on the basis of the votes as mixed by the electronic system and as selected for further transfer by the system. In any other scenario, it would not be possible to achieve the same result in the manual re-count as in the original electronic count, in view of the different selections that would be made in each case.
In short, retaining the variable element in surplus distribution embodied in the current rules makes it more difficult to check the accuracy of the proposed system by way of a total manual recount.
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