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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

Exactly the same thing happened in Estonia when serious flaws in their system were discovered:

And if you, in an Internet comment, dare to suggest that Estonia's system isn't airtight and hyper-secure, you'll get mobbed by Estonian trolls. :/

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As a New South Welshman, I'll mob you if you suggest that the NSW Government is capable of anything but incompetence. Both major political parties are paralysed by corruption [1].

The irony is that a world leading electronic voting system was developed by Andrew Tridgell, who lives in the ACT, which is a stone's throw from NSW (in any direction) [2]. The NSW Electoral Commission was quite free to download the GPL source code and use it as a base. I gather the GPL'd system has since been replaced with a proprietary one by the commercial partner, with the proprietary system being released under the same name [3].

[1] http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/icac-exposes-the-n...

[2] http://www.elections.act.gov.au/elections_and_voting/electro...

[3] http://archive09.linux.com/feature/38285

"The irony is that a world leading electronic voting system was developed by Andrew Tridgell"

Of Samba, Rsync, rproxy, KnightCap, hacking Tivo, SourcePuller and a host of others. Also COMP8440 at ANU ~ https://www.samba.org/~tridge/

I concur, the entire Opal/Tcard fiasco is already a good example of how things are done by the NSW Government.

As an aside, back in the early 2000's the NSW Government contracted ERG (a Perth based technology company) to implement a Smart Card system for public transport. ERG had already successfully rolled out Smart Card systems for other local public transport systems worldwide to much success, most notably for the Hong Kong public transport system, the MTR (Octopus Card), in 1997, which is still the largest such deployment to date with tens of millions of transactions daily.

Unfortunately the NSW contract ended in lawsuits back and forth with the NSW Government trying to reclaim the project cost and eventually (arguably) led to ERG's demise. Sad that a successful Australian company, a leader in it's field, able to deploy complicated systems worldwide was (in part) taken down in it's own backyard by a (in comparison) pretty straight forward project.

In my opinion it was the patronizing tone Alex Haldermann had when presenting his research, that got certain individuals riled up. About the electronic voting itself, it seemed to me that the most relevant problem that he actually discovered was lapses in the operational security during the vote counting process, where certain procedures weren't done correctly or were outright ignored.

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