Slashdot Mirror
Finnish Court Accepts E-Voting Result With 2% Lost
Nailor writes "The Helsinki Administrative court accepted the municipal voting result in an election in which 2% of votes cast were not counted at all. We discussed this situation at the time. The court noted that the e-voting machinery has a feature, that should be considered as an issue. However, it also noted that 'a little over two percent failure rate can not be considered as such as a proof that the voting official would have acted erroneously.' Does this mean 98% of votes is enough to figure out how the other 2% voted? Electronic Frontier Finland has a press release about the court decision (Google translation; Finnish original)."
There were multiple problems. Bad user interface design, which allowed modes where the votes don't get registered. Machines becoming frozen at the time of the voting process, making it impossible to press the OK button. Instructions which stated to press OK once, when you had to press it twice. And so on.
The most serious issue is that if the machine freezes for several minutes, the voter does not know what to do. If he pulls the card out before the machine returns to life and you can press the 2nd OK, your vote was lost.
No one really knows what happened why the 2% of votes were lost. I presume it is a combination of people simply walking out in the middle of the voting process, machine hangups, and people misunderstanding what they had to do, and possibly some yet unknown problems.
By the, none of the problems described above were in dispute. The court only decided that despite the problems, the result stands.
OK/Cancel buttons are a disaster-area anyway, since every OS and every application has a different idea on what order they should go in, and people get used to clicking the left/right one for OK without looking at the labels.
If you color the ok button green and the cancel button red is there any culture for which that would seem backward? I honestly don't know the answer to that, but the convention of "green=ok, red=pay attention, something's wrong" might be universal.