French e-voting hit hard by vocal detractors
France has been using e-voting machines since 2003, and most notably in the 2005 European constitutional 2005, where 50 e-voting municipalities were in play, but now that the number has climbed to 80 (out of 36,000), and a presidential election is at stake, several parties are crying foul -- and quite loudly. No specific incidents of fraud have been cited yet, but protesters sued to ban the machines outright a week before the election, noting that some models don't comply with a dual-key requirement for safety from fraud, and others, such as the iVotronic machines, have new software, but haven't been re-verified since 2005. After the first round of voting on Sunday, objections have become even more vocal, with The Socialists, the Communist Party and the Greens all banding together to decry the e-voting method as a "catastrophe." Apparently the machines posed a particular obstacle to the elderly, with some researches claiming that as many as four out of seven people over 65 couldn't vote properly. Also, voting lines were long in general, and the two hour wait on some e-voting machines apparently caused some voters to leave. The interior ministry claims they have had no problems with the machines since they were introduced in 2003. With 12 presidential candidates in the election, the three parties speaking up here by no means comprise a majority, but we're guessing we won't be hearing the end of this for a good while -- especially if things don't go their way in round two of the votes.
Read - French parties call voting machines a "catastrophe"
Read - Protestors sue to stop e-voting
