Swiss Town Holds First Internet Vote

felix.rauch writes "According to an article on Swissinfo, a small town near Geneva (Switzerland) held the first Internet-based vote this weekend. 44% of the voters (323) cast teir ballot over the Internet. Officials believe it may have been the first Internet-vote worldwide. While the Swiss media seem enthusiastic about the project, I see serious security and privacy concerns. The voters had to enter a 16-digit password, as well as their birthplace, date of birth and another number sent to them by post. Personally I think Internet-voting should be avoided until it's implemented by an open zero-knowledge protocol and checkable afterwards. Who can give a guarantee that nobody tampers with the results or creates a database with citizens voting information?"

Comments

Before we get all pedantic....

[Andy_R]

Having read some other reports on this, the Swiss are not claiming this is the first internet vote, they are saying that they believe it is the the first legally binding internet vote.

2 points

[mirko]

The voters had to enter a 16-digit password, as well as their birthplace, date of birth and another number sent to them by post.

I guess it's like using some nmber list for internet banking, which mean they shall use some SecurIDs some day which will make it quite secure.

Personally I think Internet-voting should be avoided until it's implemented by an open zero-knowledge protocol and checkable afterwards.

Well, I also think it's better to move to the voting booth but not because of privacy matters, rather because I consider that it shouldn't be as easy to vote as watching tv.

Who can give a guarantee that nobody tampers with the results or creates a database with citizens voting information?

In Switzerland ?
They've got some huge concerns about privacy there, they don't want people to feel harassed so I guess they have the will to make it safe.
BTW, as the Swiss president is elected for one year it doesn't make any sense to fake the vote as, on the other hand, the people will surely know how to turn him other in case he does some stupid things.

Now, they'll retain the possibility to vote in the booth so the Internet vote should rather seen as a possible other way to vote mean as as a replacement.

Re:Similar concerns for normal voting.

[jackb_guppy]

Swiss voting has been different in the first place.

They use a "town hall" style of voting, where they meet in the town square, debate and vote normaly by a show of hands.

Yo may think that is arcane. But at least the woman got the right to vote in the late 1980s.

Switzerland & Referendums

[CaptainZapp]

This is (in terms of voters convenience) not that big a deal as it sounds.

Dependent on the community you live in you can vote by mail at no charge. In Zurich it works like this:

3 to 4 weeks prior to a referendum (there are 2-3 per year) you get an envelope, which contains the official information, the voting forms, a card and a small envelope. You fill out the forms, place them into the small envelope, on which you seal the flap (so voting confidentiality is guaranteed), sign the card, stick everything back into the envelope it came in, close it (it's supplied with a mechanism to do just that) and drop it into the next mail box at your convenience (no stamps required).

So there is really no excuse not to vote.

I really don't see e-voting as that much more convenient and loaded with a whole pile of potential problems.

How do you know?

[SerpentMage]

How do you really know that this does not work? Did you happen to spend any time at all on the workings of their security mechanism?

Because you see as a foreigner living in Switzerland I tend to think if they can do it via the Internet then I know it works.

Swiss are conservative cautious people, who oddly enough embrace technology. Hence if it works in Switzerland then I know it will work. Case in point is 100% attendless gas stations. They are all over Switzerland now. They were introduced in 1995, but caught on really quick. And let me tell you how nice it is to have a gas station that is open 100% percent of the time. Sure people in North America have 24x7 gas stations. But I live in the country and hence that is not always the case.

_Gangs of New York_

[devphil]

One of the rare funny scenes in this movie is when an election for sheriff is being held. (This is the New York City of Tammany Hall, remember.) They show gang members raiding bars, workhouses, and tenements to round up anybody who can walk, and send them down to vote. Then they grab them on the way out of the voting hall, hustle them down the street to the barbershop, clean them up so they look different, and send them back to the voting hall.

One old guy complains how "they done already bought me out, and I already voted. Twice!" And Leo DiCaprio's character goes, "Twice? You call that doing your civic duty? Get back in there and keep voting!"

The next scene was rather insightful, I thought. Cut to Tammany Hall. A clerk walks up to "Boss" Tweed:

Clerk: Boss, they've won.
Tweed: Keep counting.
Clerk: They've won by 3000 more votes than there are voters, sir.
Tweed: How many times have I told you? It's not the voters that decide the election, it's the counters. Keep counting!

Academic Lab Solutions Exist

[Xner]

Academic types have developed systems based on cryptological primitives (such as one-way hash functions, digital signatures, cut-and-choose, public key cryptography) that satisfy all requirements you specify.

In fact, some protocols involve the goverment publishing a list of numbers after the election. The people can then perform some (non-invertible) operations on their private key and vote. If the number they obtain is listed, they can be sure their vote has been counted. The number of votes can also be checked to avoid stuffing.

For an overview of these protocols, pick up a copy of Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" and look at the literature references in the "Esoteric Protocols" chapter.

This does not change the fact that electoral offices everywhere would NEVER allow this to happen. Imagine aunt Lydia's vote did not get counted for some reason (including her not clicking the SUBMIT button), would they really want to hold another election in the name of democracy?

Re:Dumb idea.

[Matthias Wiesmann]

You have to understand that voting in Switzerland is very different from voting in other countries (especially the US). Switzerland uses a system called direct democraty. Basically if enough people ask for it (by the way of petitions), any question is subject to voting. Add to this the fact that Switzerland is a three level confederation with votation at each level and your realise that there is a lot of voting in Switzerland.

So there are more than four votations a year in Switzerland, each votation concerns itself with laws or elections of multiple levels (votations on six objects are common). All this requires a very streamlined process and people are not very willing to go to polling stations because of voting. Because of the system, people have a very different relationship to voting.

While internet voting certainly could be tampered with, believe me, the other system was not very secure. For instance in my canton, vote by mail is done in the following way:

• I get my voting papers by mail.
• I write my birthday on the card.
• I sign the card.
• I fill in my voting bullletins.
• Put everything back in the enveloppe.
• Send it back by mail.

There are many ways to cheat, but the truth is nobody cares. Swiss people are all in all quite honnest and trying to cheat would be political suicide - something like the last US election would probably mean a lot of manifestations and a full redo.

Also the truth is, Swiss politics have little impact on the overall world...

Not the first

[bulgroz0]

The Reston Association in Northern Virginia, which manages the city of Reston has held quite a few votes over the Internet.

Re:on the internet, no-one knows you're a woman

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right on the women issue,
but it has been fixed 30 years ago, in fact in some cantons now, even established aliens can vote.

you do know that Switzerland is a direct DEMOCRACY since 1 aug. 1291 ?

so much for "shakey reputation w.r.t democracy."

Re:Zero - knowledge

[afabbro]

Here in Oregon we vote by postal mail. It's wildly popular and I doubt we'll ever go back. All the privacy concerns, etc. mentioned are present in mail-in voting as well. Typically, the ballots sit for weeks in the county election boards' office, waiting to be counted. Voting by Internet is the next step.

Re:Similar concerns for normal voting

[laskoune]

They use a "town hall" style of voting, where they meet in the town square, debate and vote normaly by a show of hands
this is called "landsgemeinde" and is only used in two very small cantons. the rest of switzerland votes "normally" www.admin.ch

Yo may think that is arcane. But at least the woman got the right to vote in the late 1980s
women can vote on national elections/referendums since 1971 (not much better)
on the other hand, the death penalty was abolished in 1944 (mmm... maybe that's arcane too) ;-)

Comparison to voting by mail (very common in CH)

[Jadrano]

I think now a majority of Swiss people votes by mail, and in the cantons Geneva and Basle-City it's usually over 90%. I think most risks of Internet voting that have been mentioned are the same or even bigger with voting by mail.
- Tampering with results: With voting by mail, abuse is relatively easy, and some cases have been detected. In a neighbouring city, an employee of a home of elderly people filled out and sent the ballot papers of old people about whom he knew that they wouldn't miss them. It was detected because he filled out all of them with the same pen and sent them all together. If he had to enter all these additional data (birthplace, date of birth, password etc.), such abuse would have been much more difficult.
- Privacy: To make it a bit easier to detect such abuse of mail voting, the envelopes with which the voting forms have to be sent have unique codes (at least in Basle). People who choose to vote by mail have to trust, too, that the information on the envelopes isn't connected to the vote. I think that surveillance of the process and making sure that anonymity of the votes is guaranteed is even a bit easier with Internet voting than with voting by mail where local cases of vote tracking might be more difficult to detect.
- People being influenced: Of course, we do not know whether someone is in front of the computer alone. But that's the same when ballot papers are sent by mail.

On the whole I think that possibly, in-person voting offers a bit more security, but as soon as voting is facilitated - be it by mail or by Internet, there are some risks (in my view, they aren't too big), and then Internet voting is perhaps even one of the more secure methods.
The main reason why voting by mail was introduced was probably that there are so many votes (referendums, initiatives) in Switzerland because of the system of 'direct democracy', so there is the fear that turnout will be too low because people get tired of voting (even with the possibility of voting by mail, on average only about 40% of people participate).

Re:Similar concerns for normal voting.

[Max von H.]

Oh, come on! This is utter BS... It only happens in a tiny remote place and is a national embarrassment.

As a Swiss, I believe we have a pretty good voting system even though too few of us seem to bother with it. Thing is our system is such that we vote often on various objects. For more practicality, we vote on many objects at once, several times a year, whether they're local, state or federal.

Here in Geneva, we've been voting from home for a long time. It's a simple system: you get an envelope in you mailbox containing:

a card with your name and SS number on which you have to write down your birthdate and which you have to sign.

a booklet containing the texts of the laws being modified/added/canceled and a simplified explanation.

a booklet containing the opinions (explanations + voting recommendation) of the government AND various political parties represented.

the voting bulletins themselves with checkboxes, perfectly straightforward (if you're confused with them, you're either blind or shouldn't be allowed to vote).

an anonymous voting envelope in which you put your voting bulletins and then seal.

You return the card and the voting envelope in the envelope in which it all came in (it's a recyclable thing), drop it in a mailbox (no postage) in time (max 2 days before actual voting day") and that's it.

Now, with such an easy system and all the required information at hand, I wonder why sometimes less than 40% of us express our opinions. Hey, we have the chance to live in a super-democratic society in which we vote on every aspect of what's going on yet most of us don't make any use of it and then dare complaining about the "system" in which we're (supposedly) in control. Yup, we are in control from A to Z, unlike some other so-called "democracies" but this idea seems to be getting quite fuzzy in the general consensus, given that we're surrounded by much less democratic entities. Furthermore, our system isn't EU-compatible ; the people have too much control to allow the application of EU directives by a central government.

E-voting is only a natural evolution of our current system. It will allow instant and accurate results. I can only hope it will motivate people to vote a bit more, some great changes could come from having another 30% of the population casting votes. Regarding the anonymity of the system, I believe such concerns received great consideration given the fact we're far from being amateurs when it comes to anonymous stuff (Swiss private banking anyone?)... The security is similar to the the system used for e-banking, which has a proven record (we've had e-banking for at least 5 years with no known breach). OTOH, one of the companies behind such projects was the same responsible for digital satellite receivers cards, which have been cracked ages ago...

It's a great test-bed for e-voting systems, which are a great opportunity for newly democratic states to cheaply implement a safe voting infrastructure and other states to implement a proven, tested system at a lesser cost (Florida, you listenin'?).

Now as for the women voting status, they only got it on a federal scale in 1970, which is indeed embarrassing in a country so fundamentaly democratic. But it's getting better, we even had a female President the other year (changes each year, hard to follow!). Sure, when you come from countries where your "representatives" are as representative of your opinions than your tax declaration or party donation check, it's quite funny seeing your local shopkeeper vociferating his claims to the higher establishment on the local congress live tv feed :). It's a small country divided and subdivided in tiny entities, with little overhead from the federal government or even the state itself. Makes the whole thing awfuly bureaucratic, but we also got e-government "booths" which makes it easier to accomplish many administrative procedures. This site will link you to most official resources.

So, before dissing our electoral system with an old cliché, please get your facts straight ot you might once more make 7.5 million foes :)

Cheers,
max

13 towns in the UK already had e-voting last year

[rklrkl]

Those Swiss folks obviously didn't search for e-voting info in the UK, because 13 towns in the UK had e-voting for the local council elections in May 2002. So the Swiss initiative certainly isn't a "worldwide first".