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."

Comments

Usability Glitch?

[lecithin]

"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.

Re:Usability Glitch?

[Volante3192]

I keep hearing this argument about evoting, that it has a lower failure rate.

Can someone please find an actual study that confirms this? Or are they just hoping if something's repeated often enough it's taken as fact?

Re:Usability Glitch?

[fastest fascist]

A commenter on an article dealing with the issue at hs.fi says there were problems with the machines that may have caused this issue:
http://www.hs.fi/keskustelu/Brax%3A+Vaalitulosta+ei+voi+perua+hukka%E4%E4nien+takia/thread.jspa?threadID=148607&tstart=0&sourceStart=40&start=60
username Jones is the commenter, it's in Finnish, so here's a summary:

Commenter says she is a young female with university degree from Kauniainen who tried electronic voting with poor results. The voting machine had responsiveness issues: first the machine refused to register input of the candidate number, and after numerous presses and waiting the machine responded. The commenter then pressed the "ok" button, nothing happened. She pressed it again, harder, and pressed more times, until after several minutes of trying the buttonpress was registered. Then a screen popped up with the name of the candidate and the user was prompted again to press OK to accept the vote. Same problem with the OK button again, but she managed to get it to register after a long time of trying and waiting for the machine to respond.

If this is accurate, it's not unreasonable to think people may have thought the machine isn't even supposed to show the candidate number chosen on-screen after choosing, or that either of the OK presses aren't actually supposed to result in any response from the machine. 2% failures with these kinds of problems doesn't sound so strange.

Re:Usability Glitch?

[mrSnowman]

Any computer interface should be intuitive to whatever group of people will be using it. Whether it is a computer literate techie or an elderly grandparent that has never touched a computer before.

Especially the elderly in this case. They are the group of people who pay the most attention to politics and have the least experience with computers. If it's not intuitive to the largest group of people that will be using it it's a bad interface.

Won't somebody think of the elderly? :(

Paper ballots

[Aggrajag]

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.

Re:More information here

[canthusus]

the problem seems not to be electronic voting so much as just a poor set of instructions.

Check out "usability" - eg Donald Norman. If you need to rely on detailed instructions, then you've got a usability issue.

Truth is, we don't know the intentions of those who withdrew their card early. But they were told that they had to press "Cancel" to cancel their vote. As they didn't "follow the instructions" for either voting or not voting, I'd say there's a usability problem.

(and yes, I know people don't always follow instructions on simple paper ballots)