Serious flaws
France's electronic voting system has been responsible for
fudging the results of elections, according to a new study.
Chantal
Enguehard, a member of the Laboratory of Computer Science, Nantes Atlantique,
has been studying the results of electronic voting
for a year. She has
discovered that polling locations which use electronic voting machines
exhibit a higher number of discrepancies than those using conventional paper
ballots.
Enguehard compared the results from more than 21,000
polling stations by comparing electoral registers, which voters sign after
voting, with the total vote counts from machines and paper ballots in several
elections. She found that more than 30 percent of polling stations
that use electronic voting machines produced strange results.
Enguehard
ruled out user error because the margin of discrepancies increased in later
elections when voters were already familiar
with the systems. The research
was funding by the Ethical Citizen lobby group which called for better tools
that will enable independent evaluators to to measure the quality and
reliability of elections.