Category Archives: Trainwreck Compendium

Super Tuesday – Gloomy e-voting Wednesday

The Register has highlighted not one but two potential information quality problems with the ballots being cast in the pre-Presidential primaries in the US.

Firstly, Democrats Abroad decided to support Democrats living overseas by letting them vote on-line. This sounds like an excellent idea, this ‘electronic voting’. However, there seem to have been some concerns with the way the ballot was conducted. Apparently the ‘receipt’ that was produced to evidence the voter’s choice just showed the choice, with no other reference that could be used to support an audit. And to cap things off, when one voter tried to print her ‘receipt’ all she got was a blank sheet of paper.

David Dill and Barbara Simons are two experts in the field who wrote a nice piece on this precise risk on Monday over on www.news.com

Of course, it’s not just internet voting that is all a-jitter. With electronic voting being a much used technology in the US, it was timely that a report was issued by two voting advocacy groups that highlighted that six of the twenty four (25%) States are at high risk of malfunction of or tampering with their e-voting machines , with a further 5  States being at medium risk. That’s almost 50%.

Sheesh. It’s a good job that the stakes are so low with that level of risk in the process and with the audit trails not really being audit trails and the receipts printing out blank.

It is, after all, only a race for the Presidency of the United States. Surely the expectation of accuracy and completeness in those ballot counts will be low?

Irish Times Blogger says it better than we can… A Trainwreck Compendium

The Irish Times is one of the leading daily newspapers in Ireland. It was also one of the first with a website (www.ireland.com) in the 1990s and has taken the courageous step (in the face of Irish libel laws) of letting selected columnists write blogs as extensions of their regular print columns.

One of my personal favourites is Shane Hegarty. Shane recently blogged about various scandals of lost or misplaced personal information including the debacle of the UK’s Revenue service sticking 25 million person records on 2 cds and promptly losing them in the post. As he is a professional journalist, the piece is well written and informative so we thought we’d share it with you as a Trainwreck Compendium.

Here’s the link to Shane Hegarty’s article, which also appeared in print in the Irish Times.