The Irish electronic voting fiasco is well known to my loyal readers. However, I now have a solution to the government’s woes. A simple way of adding a voter-verifiable paper trail to the system that has been purchased, at a relatively low cost.

It’s pretty simple, when you think about it, providing a voter-verifiable audit trail. There have been a number of ideas about doing this already, expressed by Fergal Daly and John Lambe.

The problem, with the Irish system of voting is that it is very difficult to re-count the pieces of paper absolutely accurately, and absolutely in accordance with the scheme operated inside the voting machine.

As a result, you end up with a situation even worse than what you started with, where there are two ‘results’ to the election – one from the electronic result and another from the paper audit.

However, I am pretty confident there is a way to provide a system which will give a dependable paper audit output, that could be quickly audited and would be very reliable. The only problem is that I don’t think the government is really interested.