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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."
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.
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?