Part 6 – Summary and Conclusion

6.4 Other Issues

• under the system, voters who wish to register an abstention by voting for no candidate cannot do so in secrecy;
  
  
• the system does not have a voter-verifiable audit trail (VVAT), argued by many to:

• reassure voters that their vote has been correctly recorded,
  
  

• create a disincentive to the manipulation of the system by providing an external check on accuracy,
  
  

• enable recovery from a serious system failure;

• the absence of a VVAT significantly raises the standards and quality of other system testing that is required;
  
  

• the proposed system focuses a large number of new responsibilities on returning officers: it has been argued that an explicit and carefully specified “segregation of duties” between different election officials would increase safeguards against errors being made or improper manipulation by a single person operating parts of the system away from public scrutiny;
  
  

• although it has the potential to be able to carry out calculations to a higher degree of perfection than the hand counting method, the system has been designed to replicate, but in a consistent manner, the inaccuracy inherent in the current vote counting rules as regards the transfer of surpluses.

Furthermore, one consequence of retaining the current counting rules as regards the initial mixing of the votes and for the random selection of votes on the transfer of a surplus is that if a manual re-count of an election were required (as in the case of an election petition) it would not be possible to achieve the same result in a hand count as in the original electronic count, in view of the different random selections that would be made in each case.

In short, retaining the random element in surplus distribution makes it inherently more difficult to check the accuracy of the proposed system using a manual recount and this therefore has a bearing on the value of VVAT in the context of the chosen system.

This could only be avoided by a change in the electoral law to dispense with random selection in favour of a counting method such as “the Gregory method”. This, in turn, would enhance electronic voting by allowing computer systems to be used to their full capacity and would, more importantly, be more democratic in that every preference would be taken into account.

In making these observations the Commission is not advocating any particular view on the issues raised but is including them in its report in the interests of completeness.

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