[LINK] Firm makes bid for Internet voting franchises

[rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au]

Looking again at the story, this caught my eye:

>
> The system costs one Euro per vote, compared to around six or seven 
> for paper voting systems.
>
Having spent lots of time in the last couple of years learning price 
benchmarking from an expert, these sorts of statements make me think 
someone's looking at the world through bullshit-coloured glasses.

What costs "one Euro per vote"? The purchase price of the system? 
Meaningless if you have to then count the operational cost separately. 
The software license? Even more meaningless. What's included and what's 
left out? - for eg, what about trying to set up a use-once secure 
national transaction network? And so on.

Democracy comes cheap in Australia; less than ten dollars per voter in 
the national election, which given the complexities of Senate voting, 
the remoteness of 50,000 of the voters, and a handful of other 
considerations is pretty damn good.

E-voting started as a geek enthusiasm, and turned into one of the great 
carpetbagging scams of the information age. Worst of all, it delivers an 
open process into the hands of a small in crowd. This is inescapable; 
either the elite is a tiny core of experts from one vendor, or the 
slightly larger pool of open source code readers. Either way, it's 
anti-democratic in the community at large.

RC