Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
From the summary, it seems that they're defining "lost" as just "the voter intended to cast a vote for the office, but none registered", and include those caused by user error (the voter pulling out the voting card before confirming their vote, or failing to confirm their vote altogether).
In that sense, the problem seems not to be electronic voting so much as just a poor set of instructions. Poorly designed ballots in other places can lead to a similar level of "lost" votes -- for example in the U.S. state of North Carolina, about 2.5%-3% of ballots in presidential races fail to register a vote for President, compared to 1.1% in other states. The primary culprit? A poorly designed ballots where voters THINK they're casting a straight-ticket vote for every office, but in reality are casting one for every office except President.
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.
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.
We've always been at war with Eastasia, you know?
What? Like Diebold?
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)
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.
Why are only special people privileged to counting? Can they not be bought?
There are no special people. Counting the votes has to be done in public, you can go there and watch.
Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
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
You want George Bush to win the election in Finland?
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?
I finally found the video: http://www.hs.fi/videot/1135240559892?kategoria=Uutiset&sivu=1
?SYNTAX ERROR
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.
Let me relate an instance of voter fraud from the 2004 election.
The problem with all these new-fangled voting ideas is that voter fraud becomes much easier to do, because like any advanced system it has more points of failure that can be exploited.
In many close elections you see the scene of lawyers and party members from all sides lining up and counting votes, the cameras are looking at the tables, the talking heads on TV are explaining how each vote is counted by three groups of people, how every vote cast is critical, hanging chads, blah blah blah, etc.
This is the misdirection. As any student of basic sleight-of-hand knows, the part that receives the most attention is not the part where the trick is taking place. The point where "anyone" can go count the votes is the part where no fraud is taking place, because it already has taken place.
You can change the outcome of an election by:
Creating more votes for yourself is a classic tactic, both legal and illegal. This is usually done with "voter drives" and bussing people to locations, raising registered voters, etc. Illegally this is done by bussing vans of bums or party supporters and paying them to vote at multiple locations, dead people voting, people in jail voting, etc. This is the primary reason some people are opposed to the idea of having voter identification laws passed, because it hampers this ability to create fictional voters.
Destroying other people's votes is difficult, because votes are much more carefully reviewed at this point. Altering the number of votes in the box, or destroying the entire pool of votes is a harder thing to achieve depending on the security measures.
Invalidating other's votes is useful because if their vote disappears or is invalidated, it makes your votes that much stronger. The vote still "exists", but doesn't count for the opponent. A version of this was seen recently where some electronic Obama votes were printing ballots for McCain. Other mechanisms are making it hard to tell which candidates the vote went for.
How this relates to the 2004 voter fraud is how the ballots were being counted in Omaha. The count was being made for overseas/absentee ballots. Those votes were being counted as they were faxed in from some collection point.
Votes, to be counted, have to be validated before they can be counted. A vote is invalid for a variety of reasons one of which is if the person chose more than one candidate for president. A VERY large number of votes were invalid from this pool of faxed in votes.
Now this wasn't a scientific experiment, this is just what was observed. It was noticed that when a ballot appeared to be left leaning for the different things be voted on (all the other usual things one votes for, judges, the legislature, amendments, etc.) both Kerry and Bush were voted for. When the ballot was right leaning, only Bush was voted for.
This was escalated as an interesting grouping of ballot issues to supervisors, however if anything was done I don't know.
To summate, no Bush type voter had any problem filling in their ballot, however Kerry type voters seemed to overwhelmingly vote for both Bush and Kerry, therefore invalidating their ballot.
Now I'm of the opinion that Democrats are politically immature in many of this political beliefs and naive in many things. I do not think, however, that they are incapable of voting nor vote with this level of failure.
Assuming those in charge were correct, that these votes were coming from a legitimate source (rather than a man-in-the-middle fake-fax type thing), I'm of the opinion that as the ballots were being faxed, they were having a mark added to Bush for any ballot that was cast for Kerry, because as they hadn't been counted yet, then the votes hadn't been declared valid/invalid. The number of votes sent was the same as the number of votes received, therefore no voter fraud had taken place, but ballot fraud had taken place.
Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps there was just a huge chunk of invalid votes all sent at once.
I'm a satanic clam.