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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."
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.
If this is true, then a 2% failure rate would be extremely low in comparison to traditional paper ballot systems. Which is not to say that the result of an unaudited electronic voting system is actually trustworthy.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
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.
Sounds like a great system. There's no way that a despotic government would ever bind the smart card ID with the vote and "re-educate" you after the election.
How do you know if your vote is registered correctly or not?
You stand there and watch while they do the counting. The whole point of pen&paper is that the voter themselves can verify that the voting process happens correctly, everything that isn't pen&paper adds a layer of intransparency that makes it much harder or impossible for the voter to verify the voting process is going as advertised.
e-voting doesn't make fraud any more or less difficult. It just makes things less transparent, and probably makes fraud easier.
E-Voting doesn't only make fraud easier, it makes large scale fraud possible in the first place. With paper you will have a really though time manipulating more then a single ballot box, with E-Voting on the other side you can do large scale fraud pretty easily when you sit at the right spot.
The good thing about pen&paper is that it works even when you can't trust the government, it of course doesn't stop fraud in that case, but it makes it much easier to detect.
This isn't a glitch nor a problem with the machines.
Yeah, the good old "blame the user" solution, its after all just democracy that is at stake...
Why is it even possible for the user to eject the card before stuff is done? Any half decent ATM doesn't allow that, it holds the card inside until everything is finished. Why doesn't the voting machine do the same? Seems to me to be a pretty clear case of a badly designed system.
If only it was. I really don't get e-voting. Why do people insist on using these highly complex, extremely expensive systems when the simple approach (write an X in a box on a piece of paper) works well and has done for hundreds of years, in the UK anyway.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
"If this is true, then a 2% failure rate would be extremely low in comparison to traditional paper ballot systems."
Cite please.
"Which is not to say that the result of an unaudited electronic voting system is actually trustworthy."
If the voter (usually via thier representative) can't determine that the election procedure is trustworthy then by default it isn't.
PS: To the OP and others who keep making the suggestion that "stupid people shoudn't be allowed to vote" - I submit that they are petitioning to disenfanchise themselves but are too stupid to realise it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Quite simply, because they want instant results when the polls close.
Does it really matter if you have them instantly - as opposed to the next morning? And sacrifice trust in the validity of the election for such a small convenience?
If you have a truly verifiable e-Voting system with a paper trail, the final, binding results aren't faster either - because a few districts will still have to be counted manually to verify the machine count.
It's insanity. There is no advantage to electronic voting. It's expensive, complicated and prone to failure and manipulation on so many levels, it's obscene. It undermines democracy.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
The card should have been locked into the machine until the voter said 'OK' or cleared the screen, and locked it in with an alert and a deactivation warning if the person left the booth without doing either. Anyone can get confused about simple directions for an entirely new system. How many of us have tried to walk away from an ATM with our card still in it because we were distracted?
An Electronic voting system in a democracy needs to be designed in such way that 70 years old person who maybe has seen a computer couple times and 20-year-old, will have the same success rate.
There never ever should have been a button labeled "OK". Instead maybe one with "Press this and you'll vote will be registered and locked."
The machine should never have allowed the voting process to be left at that limbo state. Giving the card back actually implies to the voter that the voting has been succesfully finished if the system doesn't clearly state to the voter that his/her vote has not been registered.
This sounds like a nice feature to keep stupid people from voting.
Yes, this is a tech site but you can't honestly be that arrogant can you?
This has nothing to do with stupidity of the voters and everything with the quality level of the system design required for voting systems. And stupid people have the right to vote too.
Holy shit. You have to use a smartcard to vote? Can it be tracked to a specific voter? Or rather, are any mechanisms implemented to make sure it can't be? If not, this is an even bigger WTF than losing a couple of votes.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
That's why you don't have just one person doing a particular task, you have several people do it and compare results.
Come on, this isn't rocket science.
Paper ballots have to be counted by people. Lots of people. People are error-prone.
With the right process, you can make manual counting almost error- and tamper-proof. First, the counting is done in public. Representatives from each party are present, and anyone can watch. Second, the votes are counted twice, by different people. If there is a difference, the count is repeated.
This is the reason you want machines to do the counting. It's what computers do best. At least properly configured.
But it's not transparent. The counting is not public. The machine is a black box. Sure, it gets certified by an accredited agency - but they only test a sample, not every machine that gets used. In the end, you can only hope that your vote gets counted by a "properly configured" machine, without any possibility to verify the result. (Unless you have a paper trail machine. Which again would have to be counted manually, defeating the purpose of the machine in the first place.)
And is e-voting that expensive? Really? Compared to having thousands of workers and supervisors spend hours upon hours counting and recounting paper votes? I doubt that.
Voting machines are very expensive, not least because of all the auditing and certification that comes along with them. They need to be supported and maintained as well. Election workers, on the other hand, don't get paid (at least here in Germany), they're volunteers. The bulk of the cost is in the printing of the ballots and some bureaucracy. And even with e-Voting, some ballots will have to be printed for absentee voters, so the initial printing cost is there anyway.
Even if in the long run voting machines should prove cheaper (which I don't believe) - I feel that having a proven, transparent, trusted, publicly verifiable voting system should be worth the cost.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
That's a great idea. You realize, of course, that people would immediately start adding additional questions and turning away people who don't give the right answer. Two personal favorites are "Who are you going to vote for?" and "What color is your skin?"
The problem with any type of merit based system, is that the "merit" will quickly become subjective to the advantage of the people who get to decide what the "merit" is.
In other words, that's a simple recipe for corruption.
Fanatically anti-fanatical