The PowerVote Voting System manufactured by the Dutch company NEDAP is marketed in the United States by Liberty Election Systems as the LibertyVote. The website claims that with their voting system,"voters can be rest assured that their votes are securely and accurately processed."

Concerns expressed by many IT professionals about the security of the e-voting system chosen for use in Ireland were today shown to be well-founded when a group of Dutch IT Specialists, using documentation
obtained from the Irish Department of the Environment, demonstrated that the NEDAP e-voting machines could be secretly hacked, made to record inaccurate voting preferences, and could even be secretly reprogrammed to run a chess program.

The recently formed Dutch anti e-voting group, "Wij vertrouwen stemcomputers niet" (We don't trust voting computers), has revealed on national Dutch television program "EenVandaag" on Nederland 1, that they have successfully hacked the Nedap machines -- identical to the machines purchased for use in Ireland in all important respects.

Irish Citizens for Trustworthy Evoting (ICTE) representative Colm MacCarthaigh, who has seen and examined the compromised Nedap machine in action in Amsterdam, notes "The attack presented by the Dutch group would not need significant modification to run on the Irish systems. The machines use the same construction and components, and differ only in relatively minor aspects such as the presence of extra LEDs to assist voters with the Irish voting system.

A group of experts have launched a campaign against the voting machines used in elections in the Netherlands. They say the computers, produced by NEDAP, are unreliable. These are the same machines that are stored in warehouses in Ireland for not being accurate and the same machines being marketed in New York and New Jersey by Libety Systems.

On a website, initiator Rop Gonggrijp explains he wants to check up on elections via voting computers. He is founder of XS4All, the oldest Dutch Internet provider. Gongrijp is backed by people including software writer Peter Knoppers of the University of Delft, researcher Anne-Marie Oostveen of the Rathenau Institute and encryption expert Barry Wels.

In the Netherlands, voting with a pencil is only occasionally still used. Computers are used almost everywhere. This will not be different during the 22 November early general elections.

"Checkups on vote-counting are done by a handful of technicians, test institutions and civil servants," Gonggrijp complains. He wants the source code of the software used to be published. A copy should be made of each vote to allow retrospective checking of the outcome and to be able to carry out a random survey, Knoppers added.

Nederlandsche Apparatenfabriek (Nedap), the company that supplies around 90 percent of the voting machines used in the Netherlands, said it would even consider releasing the source code. "Anyone could then copy our machines", a spokesman explained. Nedap also supplies voting machines to foreign governments.

On July 04, 2006 The Commission on Electronic Voting presented its second report to the Ceann Comhairle concerning its further work in relation to the secrecy, accuracy and testing of the NEDAP/Powervote electronic voting system. NEDAP/Powervote is being marketted in the United States as Liberty Voting Systems. The Commission concluded that while it can recommend the voting and counting equipment of the chosen system for use at elections in Ireland, subject to further work it has also recommended, it is unable to recommend the election management software for such use.

Irish Citizens for Trustworthy Evoting (ICTE) today welcomed the release of the Commission on Electronic Voting's second report on the secrecy and accuracy of the Nedap/Powervote e-voting system. "We are satisfied that this report vindicates our concerns about this e-voting system, particularly the need for a voter verified paper audit trail (p153,4) and the need to entirely replace the vote-management section of the system (p14)" said Margaret McGaley (pictured at right), spokesperson for ICTE.

In response to Minister Roche's determination to continue with the introduction of this system, Ms McGaley highlighted the expense the necessary modifications would entail. "We should not decide to use this system without doing a full cost-benefit analysis both for the system as a whole, and from this point on. The changes laid out by the commission are extensive. They will require a significant investment of both time and money to implement, and we need to ask if this system is worth it. The €60 million that has been spent to date is gone and the futher investment of several years, and millions of euro, will not bring it back."

"We are particularly happy to see, on page 153 and 154, that the commission have explicitly stated that the paper system is superior to the chosen system because the latter does not provide a voter verified paper audit trail." said
Ms McGaley. ICTE maintains that no electronic voting system can be trustworthy unless it includes a paper-based voter verified audit trail (VVAT), a view shared by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Irish Computer Society (ICS). According to Fergal Daly of ICTE: "After repeated failures of electronic voting systems, many states in the US are enacting laws mandating VVAT. We should learn from their mistakes rather than repeating them."