Slashdot Mirror

Finnish e-voting results annulled, municipalities to hold new elections by Electronic Frontier Finland ry (Effi), the best summary in English, IMO;
Helsingin Sanomat;
Helsinki Times;
The Brad Blog;
NewsRoom Finland;
YLE; and
Turre (the lawyers that won the case).

The voting system was provided by Tieto and Scytl. In their News Page, Scytl declares: "Scytl's Pnyx.core successfully used in local elections in Finland" Shouldn't they update this...? It is even possible that the 2% of the votes lost was due to the Pnyx.core, instead of usability issues with the voting terminals, as has been commonly assumed - who knows.

Turre Legal has another post about the subject, this time in English.

This post focuses on differences between Finnish and Swedish trials.

The prosecutor dropped half of the charges because he had misunderstood the behaviour of the BitTorrent. The half of the charges were about making pirated copies.

This however still leaves, as the TFA states, the charges about 'assisting in making available'. This also does not affect the claims of the stakeholders, they are still "valid". Also the maximum possible sentence is still the same.

Swedish prosecutor has been really careful with this case and propably doesn't want to risk the case with false charges. All the tracker files provided by stakeholders as the files downloaded are carefully selected. They even have listed every IP met using those .torrent files and made sure that every one of those has a Swedish IP among them. The prosecutor is also careful in using any previous cases against torrent tracker (for example Finnreactor case in Finland).

A Finnish lawyer Mikko Välimäki has made a blog post about the case (Google translation, original is here)

According to the Electronic Frontier Finland article, the troubled system was used in areas representing 2% of the electoral roll, but actually affected only 232 voters total. Finland has a population of 5.5 million. Depending on how many of those voted, less than 0.01% of all votes were actually lost; a much better margin of error than most paper ballot systems.

Only the Turre Legal blog mentions the "2% of all votes" figure, and its source is...another Slashdot summary, which is also wrong.

It's still a problem, especially at the municipal level, but it's a much smaller problem than it's made out to be.

...and now there's a real blog post in English on Turre Legal's blog.

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