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Finnish E-Voting System Loses 2% of Votes
kaip writes "Finland piloted a fully electronic voting system in municipal elections last weekend. Due to a usability glitch, 232 votes, or about 2% of all electronic votes were lost. The results of the election may have been affected, because the seats in municipal assemblies are often decided by margins of a few votes. Unfortunately, nobody knows for sure, because the Ministry of Justice didn't see any need to implement a voter-verified paper record.
The ministry was, of course, duly warned about a fully electronic voting system, but the critique was debunked as 'science fiction.'
There is now discussion about re-arranging the affected elections. Thanks go to the voting system providers, Scytl and TietoEnator, for the experience."
"It seems that the system required the voter to insert a smart card to identify the voter, type in their selected candidate number, then press "ok", check the candidate details on the screen, and then press "ok" again. Some voters did not press "ok" for the second time, but instead removed their smart card from the voting terminal prematurely, causing their ballots not to be cast."
No. This isn't a glitch nor a problem with the machines. 98% of the voters got it right. That means that the directions were pretty clear.
This sounds like a nice feature to keep stupid people from voting.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
The article says the system was in use for "about 2 per cent of the electoral roll". The summary says "about 2% of all electronic votes were lost". lol wut?
2 percent off due to human error, and most likely zero percent off tallying error. I betcha that compares pretty damn well to our system.
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
http://www.arkko.com/evotingfailure
For information, I am a citizen of one of the three small places where the system was tested. I have already sent out an appeal of the decision to the voting board; if necessary, I will also appeal to the administrative court. Lets see how this plays out. I think we have a good chance of overturning the election results.
I'm living in one of those three experimental places and when I went to vote they offered me electrical version. I told 'em to frack off and give me true democratic way to vote because electronic one is very bad and unreliable. How do I know that communists ain't gonna change my vote?
Anyway, I made a nice scene there and few people turned away from voting electronic. I felt good .. a true savior of democratic society.
Municipality / Number of votes given / number of lost votes / lowest number of votes for elected person
Vihti: 7087 / 122 / 77
Kauniainen: 2982 / 61 / 49
Karkkila: 2165 / 49 / 35
surprise!
Call me an old software biz cynic but when I see the phrase "didn't see any need to implement a voter-verified paper record" I read that as "given complete assurance by the sales team that the system was 100% accurate". Never attribute to malice that which is just as easily explained by incompetence. Never attribute to incompetence that is is more readily explained by a bunch of lying sales weasels.
I would like to call this a layer 8 problem, but electronic voting vendors need to make this as idiot proof as possible. No paper trails, supposed missing votes... way to go guys.
Writing a number to a piece of paper has worked here in Finland for over hundred
years now so I really don't see the need for e-voting. Also the e-voting system
has been implemented by one of the crappiest IT-companies ever, TietoEnator, whose
main areas of expertise are: missing deadlines, underestimating budgets and designing
the worst and unusable UIs for the simplest of applications.
Considering it's these big IT corporations that have 'designed' and sold this system to local covernment... Makes me wonder how it suddenly could be a commie plot for altering the votes?
One of the concerns of a democratic state about revealing votes is that votes can be bought.
It's cheaper to buy individuals than half of the people in a democratic state.
If votes are open as a database and can be mined by anyone who knows how to do a select statement and if there can be no untraceable ID... there will never be a vote miscount.
Why are only special people privileged to counting? Can they not be bought?
My previous employer, how nice ;o)
Well, at least I voted using pen and paper, and so did the great majority of Finns, and still they had the results ready the same night. Which brings me to a giant WTF: why introduce an electronic system, when good nordic organization will provide poll results the same day anyway?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I guess that's what you get when you get a system made as cheaply as possible.
If they really wanted a good system, they should have looked up who makes those ATM machines for banks.
Or at the very least, those automate ticket vendors at the movie theater. Even those have a goddamn paper trail. What the hell, do those just cost TOO much to deploy?
All the people who talk about e-voting want a paper record. But that has its own problems, the main one being the same problem as any voting system:
How do you know if your vote is registered correctly or not?
With a secret ballot, there is no transparency. The only thing you can verify is that approximately the same number of people that went into the machine cast a vote. And at least in the US, there's no requirement that you actually cast a vote when you're in the booth, as far as I can tell. I've never tried to walk out without voting, but I expect there's no way they can force you to vote.
Are the tallies wrong? How can you tell, except by interrogating every voter...which wouldn't work, because voters may lie or change their vote when asked what/whom they voted for.
In fact, how many paper ballots are invalidated because the voter voted for multiple candidates or otherwise invalidated their ballot? 2% may be low compared to real paper ballots.
e-voting doesn't make fraud any more or less difficult. It just makes things less transparent, and probably makes fraud easier.
Instead of having to print and fill out tens of thousands of ballots, register lots of dead people, or stuff ballot boxes, all of which have severe logistical problems and can be traced with a bunch of work, all you need to do perform e-fraud voting is compromise a couple of computers up in the food chain. There is no reliable auditability for e-voting unless you remove the secret ballot requirement...and even then, it's all plastic anyway. Logs (and audit logs) are a lot easier to fake than tens or hundreds of thousands of paper ballots. The latter requires coordination among large numbers of people; e-voting fraud just requires a couple of focused and motivated geeks. Bits are bits, baby, and our jobs is to make sure the bits are in the right order.
i'd trust paper ballots over any kind of e-voting any day. It's not hard to design a ballot that doesn't allow hanging chads. It's probably impossible to design a computer system that can't be compromised by someone with enough motivation.
when someone ejects their card prematurely, you need to have a flashing red light and a siren going off shrieking "you're an idiot! step away from the voting machine! please learn to follow directions!" on repeat.
of course - making people wait for their verifible printed ballot might work too.
which, i do not know how anyone would implement an anonymous paper ballot... maybe just have it print out a bunch of squiggles a la the standard UPS label so in the event of a conflict someone can take their ticket to the counter, check the vote and receive a simple yes/no of whether or not that vote was counted... obviously not say "who" it counted towards, just that it was counted and was recorded in the system... i dunno.
What? Like Diebold?
Since for some reason the cliche' in American media is that the USA are the oldest functioning democracy on the world, you may actually learn something today: Finland is. Finland introduced universal suffrage and the right to run for office for women in 1906. The USA as a whole can be counted as a democracy since 1964, when the blacks in the South states were finally allowed to vote and run for office and poll taxes were abolished (though most states had universal suffrage and right to run, but there is no such thing as a democracy for the few).
Sad to see that a nation with such a history is going down the drain of electronic voting...
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
1. use two small embedded or slim line PCs in one cabinet.
2. both tally data to be added to two different servers running different software.
3. if in doubt get IBM to do it, they helped the germans accurately in ww2.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Since these people did not follow through and press "okay" the final time, a paper record would have done nothing. This is user error that would not have been fixed in any way by a paper record.
How many fulltime jobs can one man have?
The UK and US voting systems deliberately throw away at least 50% of votes.
Deleted
You want George Bush to win the election in Finland?
" but the critique was debunked as 'science fiction.'"
Yes, you could argue that Orwell's 1984 is science fiction.
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
The city-state of Athens that had a form of democracy did not comply with the definition given by the GP, since women and slaves did not have the vote (just like the USA when it was founded...) and in any case only lasted for a few decades. I think you may possibly find that New Zealand beat the Finns to it, though.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
If you need to write instructions for a process as simple as voting, you've frakked up the design of the system. Why were users able to remove their card before a vote was registered?
"...until after several minutes of trying the buttonpress was registered."
No wonder why Nokia phones are slow, if the Finns have are willing to try registering a keypress for several minutes.
Funny how digital systems sometimes ends up acting like analog system. Even though it is "just 1 and 0", there is still a loss.
I finally found the video: http://www.hs.fi/videot/1135240559892?kategoria=Uutiset&sivu=1
?SYNTAX ERROR
Here are a couple of instructional videos, courtesy of the Finnish Ministry of Justice, on how to use the (experimental) Finnish e-voting system. Even though they're in Finnish, they show how the user interface works and looks like:
And here's an image showing the machine in action.
Made In The USA.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Actually it has only been reported there were more than 200 cancelled voting sessions. They didn't tell how many of those retried and successfully voted the second time!
Sorry, I disagree. The usability of voter "machines" *MUST* be easy. It isn't about "stupid" it is about computer literacy. There is still a very large segment of the population that is not "stupid" but IS computer illiterate. John McCain comes to mind.
My father in-law runs his own business with about 10 employees, he's 76 years old, sharp as a tack. He understands the issues and while we don't tend to agree, he absolutely is in charge of his faculties, but he has to call me to check web pages for him because he does not own a computer.
Should he be denied his vote? The correct answer is no. Just because a large majority of people are computer literate, we must not exclude those who are not.
Computers are not so old as to be a defining part of citizenship.
"Electronic systems: good enough to control the movement of trillions of dollars in the international monetary system, perfect as a way to make sure the bombs that we drop in the third world 'won't miss' their targets, but absolutely unable to display a form on the screen and get user input in an election - go back to paper!"
Please moderate the parent up. One of the basic tenets of usability is minimizing cognitive processing by users, 'the need to figure out what they need to do'.
Enough of the paper-trail fetish already. As with almost every other potential failure case, a paper record of votes in this case would have accomplished absolutely nothing.
One group told the Finnish government that they would be able to count votes by harnessing the movement of subatomic particles to display ephemeral text and shapes, to automatically sense human touch, to follow a pre-programmed decision script written in advance and placed into microscopic internal storage, and to protect their results by encoding them mathematically.
Another group explained some of the reasons why this might not all work perfectly.
And it wasn't until the second group chimed in that some wiseass said "hey, that sounds like science fiction!" ...
Well, I feel a little better about my own government now. That's kinda nice, I guess.
Huh? You didn't get instructions first time you voted?
Ok, maybe the instructions weren't given to you in written form, but I'm sure there was a written text somewhere explaining some people how to explain it to new voters.
Anything you haven't done before is hard. Anything you've done earlier enough times, is easy.
I tried to post before, but it seems that Slashdot discarded the post.
Sure, why not ? The man was a disaster in the helm of the United States, since it has a sizeable military and nuclear weapons, but Finland has neither and we could use someone who pushed a little harder for Finland's interests against the EU - the current crop is all too willing to roll over to appear as "team players".
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Anything you haven't done before is hard. Anything you've done earlier enough times, is easy.
Why don't the voting systems leverage previous knowledge? We know people can use a pen and paper. Something this important isn't the time to start messing around with novelty interfaces. Yeah, it might take longer to count, but unless you fuck up more than 106,461 votes, you're doing better than the e-voting system.
As a poll worker, I love having an electronic machine to help people cast votes.
For all those wanting to go back to a paper-based system, I would merely point out that the business world has been working for the past 30 years to move away from paper records. Would you want your banker to revert to keeping your records in hand-written ledger books? Hardly.
Voting machines are very, very useful.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Maybe because Australians are force to vote (or be fined)?
Did you bother to read the very next sentence OP wrote after the bit you quoted?!
Or perhaps, it's the result of compulsory voting
I seem to remember something about the last election in Finland. Didn't they vote for Conan O'Brian ?
If 2% of votes are unaccounted for, obviously they aren't finished.
And the 2000 US Presidential election was in doubt because of a usability glitch in the Florida paper ballots. I wish we would get to the core issue. Who cares if it's paper or electronic, we need a WELL DESIGNED voting solution.
Ah yes, the new "democracy". Let the stupid people rule the country while not counting the stupid people's votes. The blind leading the deaf. Brilliant.
Next up, Senators should have to make/have been given a million dollars a year before running for election, be white, Christians and have no better than a B average coming out of whatever cushy Ivy League University their upper 0.1% class family put them through with their Carbon (oil/coal/diamond/blood) Money. Outliers from this group are only allowed under affirmative action or some other silly "diversity" law, but must follow at least half of the above tenants.
Let's not be fooled.
Finland is not the prototypical nanny-state scandinavian country. Despite having some of the trimmings of those, it is a hardline right-wing country, which sprinkles just enough goodies to keep the rabble in line. Otherwise, it is a hardass tough right-wing business-friendly country. Remember that this little country was able to keep the soviet union off it's territory, and it was glad to help the nazis during world-war II.
So it's not surprising that they would use tamperable voting technology, which is favoured by right-wing regimes because it can stealthily steal elections.
But I would not want to put a card with my identity in the machine that is going to register my vote!!! Seriously, I would have trouble to trust that I am voting anonymously.
Oh You mean this:
http://www.ironsky.net/site/
So, Finland only has ~11600 voters???
There are not enough people that can count...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Why were users able to remove their card before a vote was registered?
Failure to eject the card is also a failure mode. Though, it could have been solved the old-fashioned way of a paperclip eject method.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
[Added 29th Oct:]
Reduce, reuse, cycle
For all those wanting to go back to a paper-based system...
It's not "wanting to go back".
It's "not wanting to lose the paper".
You can have an electronic system that produces a paper ballot.
Sounds like the Canadian system.
What they need to do is get those who make electronic gambling systems to design them and those who regulate those systems (like Nevada Gaming Commission) to test them. You'd probably wind up something like the Finnish paper system, but it would be reliable :)
I can see why you might be reminded about teachers writing irrelevant, pedantic bullshit in tests, but I can't see why this makes you sympathetic. Tests in school should be about determining the student's understanding, not about jumping through hoops to give your teacher a cheap authoritarian thrill. Voting should be about democracy, not democracy subject to one's ability to adhere to subtleties that any individual could honestly overlook. There's no reason for making the system more complicated than it needs to be.
One day we will have mathematical assurances that our votes are being counted properly by electronic voting machines. Cryptographers have been working on mathematically proven cryptographically safe voting schemes for years. (See also Bruce Schneir's Applied Cryptography.) Secure algorithms already exist, although they are not yet fully practical.
We need to consider voting a cryptographic problem and a research area of critical interest. A CERN-like multi-national government funding agency should work to develop a practical, economical, open-source technological solution with mathematically proven security. Once it is developed we can distribute it globally for free.
Electronic Voting can be much better than paper ballots. We just need to stop being stupid about it.
... She is, however, a PhD, extremely literate and well-read, and very informed on political issues. Her vote should count in any election, but she would definitely have an even chance of yanking the fucking card out...
Your description of your mother sounds remarkably similar to mine. I'm frequently astonished at how well my mother has done in her career. But the way I interpret it is that our respective mothers can't be bothered to follow basic instructions probably sitting right there on the screen. While it certainly is *possible* that the instructions are unclear, I doubt it since 98% of the people managed just fine.
If I showed that sort of lack of attention to my job I'd be fired and would deserve it. I frankly expect no less from someone who is doing something as important as casting a ballot. Voting is a right but it is a responsibility too.
Voting should be about democracy, not democracy subject to one's ability to adhere to subtleties that any individual could honestly overlook. There's no reason for making the system more complicated than it needs to be.
Agreed but there comes a point when you can't make things any simpler. Voting is a right but it is a responsibility too. Presuming that the system indeed been made as simple as practically possible (a big if, I know) and someone still can't be bothered to actually read some very simple instructions, it's hard to feel much sympathy. I think there is no greater insult to the democratic process than low expectations from the electorate.
Do you want someone who pushes for your interests, or who actually gets them? Having lots of gumption is great. If you want that, I'm sure we could send you Cheney. But getting you anything you actually need, I hear Bill Clinton needs a new job. I wouldn't want to be in that house with Hillary right now, and a nice retirement away from the USA might give him or them something else to do.
What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
The financial systems are all fully audited by both parties to each transaction. They don't trust each other, and so they each insist on full auditing.
Every military system is developed, tested, and operated by people who really want it to work properly, because they might die if it doesn't.
Voting systems are developed, tested, and operated by the party that is "in power" at the time. If it works properly, they might lose power. They have an incentive to cheat, so they design the system to make cheating possible. In that sense, voting is more like a financial system than it is like a military system.
Because one party to an election (the current government) has both incentive and ability to cheat, the other party (the people) are right to insist on full auditing.
Complete voting process with pencil and paper:
With electronic voting:
Usage: km/h for speed (kilometers per hour); kph for very slow impulses (kilopond hours).
"Is Obama a Republican?"
If the voter can not properly answer the question then he forfeits his right to vote due to Mental Incompetence. Mentally-incompetent people are typically treated the same way, legally, as a minor. Minors can not vote.
1) Name one indicator of macroeconomic health that economists describe with the phrase "fundamentals of the economy".
No, Panderpants, it is not "the American worker." Just because you're campaigning to the "non-elite" voter demographic doesn't mean you're excused from a basic understanding of the job you're seeking. My reading of the polls is that even your core constituents began wondering if you were deliberately insulting their intelligence, or whether you're really that stupid yourself.
2) Is bin Laden an Afghan or a Shiite?
If you're caught trying to cheat the people by copying answers, say from Joe Lieberman for sake of discussion, you will also be removed from any office you currently hold. Maybe you can find gainful employment making deliveries for a nearby beer distributor.
Obviously, until we have stricter minimum standards for a representatives than an age and being birthed in United States territory, any such test for the voter puts the cart before the horse. Then, there will still be the problem that voting is a right, not a privilege to be exercised according to anybody else's standards, but at least the candidates would be held to the same standard, albeit unjust and un-Constitutional.
"I can't imagine how things could get any worse!" (some guy) "That could just be failure of imaginatioÂn on your p