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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)."
If it is a first past the post system this is a problem. If it is majority rules, then as long as there is enough of a majority.
2% failure rate is a bit much though?
sudo mount --milk --sugar
If one person had 70% and the other 30%, the 2% won't matter and they should accept the election while fixing the problem for the next. If it's 51/49 victory, then its an issue now.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
2% doesn't mean anything unless you know the spoilage rate for non-electronic voting. In the US 2000 elections, 1.94% of the ballots cast were spoiled, and most of those were not electronic. I don't know if Finland usually has similar spoilage rates, but if they do I don't see why this is any more or less a problem than the old method.
Unfortunately, around 2% of the EFF's press release was not translated correctly into English. I would like to assure all slashdotters that their comment posts about it will still be accepted for discussion.
I guess this is a question of whether it is possible to have a "perfect" user interface such that 100% of people who use it will get it right. Given the number of nincompoops out there, that is a pretty difficult problem. What is the percentage of mistakes with paper ballots? I bet there are 2% who manage to screw that up too.
I looked at the demo of the voting machine user interface and it seems perfectly sensible. You put your voting card in and press the number of the candidate you are voting for. A message comes up with large friendly letters telling you something like "This is the candidate you are voting for: <candidate details>. Press OK to cast your vote. [OK] [CANCEL] Apparently, at this point 2% of the voters simply pulled their card out of the machine and walked out of the booth without pressing OK. If they didn't have the confirmation screen, then the same people would press the wrong number and vote for the wrong candidate, and then complain that they weren't given a chance to correct it.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Except in extremely close races, a smallish percentage of lost/spoiled/uncounted votes isn't an issue as long as the lost votes are a representative subset of all the votes. If it is a selective subset, then you have a serious, serious problem.
Same thing as polling. If the people you do poll are a representative sample, you don't actually need all that many of them to get the correct answer. If you get an unrepresentative sample, then your results are worthless. It should be noted, of course, that with elections, unlike polling, you are still obligated to put forth your best effort to count everybody's vote(though, depending on the technology, imperfection is inevitable to some degree).
Unless the 2% of lost votes actually matter (e.g., the race is close, or 2% is signifant for proportional representation, or it indicates a deeper systemic problem) why do they really matter?
Standard disclaimer: legalese may not be 100% accurate. I am not a lawyer.
Electronic Frontier Finland ry (Effi) is shocked by today's decision by the Helsinki Administrative Court. The court downplayed the problems of e-voting and declined to annul the result of the election. Thus, the elections will not be repeated unless the Supreme Administrative Court overturns the decision. After last year's municipal elections, it was found that 232 voters' votes were lost.
Effi assisted in 16 complaints regarding e-voting in the three municipalities in which it was trialled. Based on the witness and expert statements gathered by Effi, the problems were due, amongst other things, to machines freezing at the moment of voting, inadequate testing, user interface design issues, not fixing detected problems and incorrect instructions. In some trial municipalities, even one vote could have changed the members of the council that was elected.
A central basis for the decision was that "A failure rate of slightly more than 2% can not, as such, be considered to show erroneous activity on the behalf of the election authority... The threshold for repeating an election must also be high even with respect to realising basic state rights."
Lawyer Mikko Välimäki, the complainants' advocate, comments: "The decision does not seem to be well founded. The problems are undeniable, and the election result was incorrect. The Administrative Court's line chips away at the trust in Finnish democracy. What happened to the basic rights of the "slightly more than 2%"?"
The vice chair of Effi, Ville Oksanen, wonders: "I understand that we agree that the election trials had serious problems. Now, however, the Administrative Court has accepted a situation in which it is clear that the result of the election did not correspond to the will of the voters. The last candidates to pass are within the margin of error of the system." Oksanen continues: "Not even the municipalities have denied the existence of problems in the judicial process or the possible effect of the missing votes on the results of the election. Going by the Administrative Court's logic, we could give up recounting votes, because the results don't change by more than a few votes anyway. The constitution guarantees everyone an equal right to vote. It doesn't say anything about 98%!"
Jari Arkko, who complained about the elections in Kauniainen, intends to appeal the decision: "We will study the court's decision in the next few days, but we have previously considered the matter to be so important in principle that we have reason enough to appeal to the Supreme Administrative Court." In Vihti, complainant Tero Miettinen agrees: "A badly implemented system should not decide who is elected to the council of my home town. The margin of error in the electronic voting was many times that of the traditional election system. It is hard to understand why the Administrative Court does not consider this an indication that the system has failed."
We can never have a 100% perfect system. Paper ballots lose about 0.5% of votes in Finland. But 2% is way too much. We spent a lot of money on that system, and it gives worse results than the almost free paper ballot system (the votes are counted by volunteers).
The reasons for the mess include incompetence on the part of the ministry organizing the elections and completely ignoring the feedback from external experts prior to the election. For instance, minister of justice, Tuija Brax, painted the worries as "science fiction" just before the elections.
But I am even more stunned by the handling of the problems after they were discovered. Normally, if you get problems you try to deal with them and rectify the situation. But many of the government officials, voting boards, etc. have focused on blaming the users, explaining that 2% isn't a big deal, and attempting to avoid discussion of the actual technical problems that were discovered.
And it gets worse. My city voting board actually blamed the votes for purposefully misusing the machines so that they would appear unreliable. Conspiracy! Normally it is the crazy citizens who suspect the government of conspiracies, but this time the government thinks the citizens are conspiring against them. Maybe the officials involved should be re-allocated for JFK murder investigations...
More information here:
http://www.arkko.com/vaalit/evoting.html
There will be an appeal to the highest court.
Luckily, I am one of those who voted with pen and paper. From what I've heard, the electronic voting system was fairly complicated, and my guess is that I could have fallen victim of it.
The candidate I voted for didn't get through. I think I'll blame it on the fucking electronic voting (I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact that he promoted a rabidly anti-car and pro-cycling agenda).
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Of course NOT. ABSOLUTELY NOT. The answer here could never be yes if you are going to even begin to pretend you have a form of democracy.
I can accept that my own vote may not be counted due to any number of errors in the voting process. I WILL NEVER ACCEPT that somebody uses math to determine how I *may* have voted and use that to determine who will represent my interests in government.
If the 2% does not make a difference in deciding the vote, then the error rate does not affect the outcome. If that 2% could change the outcome, than the ONLY solution is to vote again.
To not have another vote is accepting the outcome of a flawed process. It may be practical to do so in some situations, but it does not change the fact the process is *FLAWED*.
Of course, I don't know a single government that is not deeply flawed anyways.
I can deal with 2% lost votes in one election. But why they want to use electronic voting machines in the first place I'm not getting. And if they plan to use them after this I'll be voting by pen and paper as long as it is an option.
The Finnish system is so simple that you can't really make it any better. You get a piece of paper, with a circle designating where to write your number. A line shows which way is down.
In the voting booth there are writing models of every number, and a list of all candidates with their numbers. Most six year olds have mastered pen usage enough to copy the model numbers so that there is a 99% chance they won't be ambiguous. They are, of course, designed to be non-ambiguous in the first place.
Counting is done by hand, huge amounts of eyeballs, usually representatives from each party. You'd have to corrupt an insane amount of people to make a dent in the system.
There is no box to mis-tick, no buttons to mispress. Why fuck the system up by complicating it? Making voting cheaper is not an argument. I'd rather pay more taxes and trust that my vote counts whey they spend the rest...
.: Max Romantschuk
The EFF says the system is flawed because it requires people to verify their vote once they selected it? It would be far worse if there wasn't a verification.
It's not like this is unusual behaviour in any electronic system. You don't take your bank card out of an ATM or chip and pin machine until you're told to and most ATMs require a 'yes I'm sure' for any actions that would cost. You also don't yank out your card until you're told to.
A 2% spoilage rate although higher than the typical rate, isn't incredibly high. At some point you really can't make the process any easier without your actions actually making mistakes and confusion more likely. Of course there's the question : do you really want people who can't handle incredibly basic instructions voting?
I remember reading about 'foolproof' paperless voting machines in the 1960's. In fifty years, nothing seems to have changed except for the technology. You don't have a full record of the votes. People vote for a day, and at the end of the day the total does not tally, but you don't know what went wrong.
If at the end of the day, the machines logged who voted, which way, and when, then everyone would be able to check that their vote was logged correctly. However, this might allow others to know or guess the way you voted, so the ballot would not be secret.
Suppose your voting paper had a unique random barcode generated at the time your ballot paper was printed. The machine takes the candidate number of your vote and adds it to the total. It also adds your candidate number to your barcode number, and puts that in a public database. The public database would contain a set of apparently random numbers. However, if you keep your ballot paper with the number, you or someone at the voting booth ought to be able to find the number that corresponded to your vote, and check that the machine correctly tallied it.
This is a crude proposal. There are probably much better ones out there. I bet ATM software doesn't put up with a 2% error rate.
You'd better make sure that one of the options is "None of the above". I can care enough to cast my vote, but currently if I feel that none of the candidates is sufficiently qualified to do the job then my only option is to spoil my paper.
If I stay at home I get counted as a "didn't care enough to vote", if I spoil my paper I may get counted as "idiot who didn't understand the process", but I've made my mark.
You can't get staff to help with not casting a vote, the process has to be anonymous.
God: An invisible friend for grown-ups.
From the Slashdot article:
I can think of at least two folks in Minnesota that would have a problem with that many votes lost...
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/11/franken-coleman.html
Ken
Either of which would have run the banks better than the present regime.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Of course. But this case is important, because if this test had seen as a "success", the next time the system would be used for real in the whole country. I suspect the government might have actually done so, even with this mess, if there had not been a public outcry. Luckily the issues have been publicized widely, and I think we won't see a similar system in the near future. The minister of justice has talked about re-evaluating whether the whole thing makes sense, and if they go ahead, about the need for open source implementation and paper trail. This is a good thing.
NOT a feature!
weinersmith
a) It only matters if the voting margin was within that 2% otherwise it's pretty easy to determine the winner.
b) There is probably a higher rate of error getting humans to transcribe votes, with less of a chance of being picked up.
Think about it.
Would I be correct to assume that the usual collection of smelly Socialists won the overall election? If so I can hardly wait til it is their ox that gets gored.
OMG...
Did you just...
If it is a first past the post system this is a problem.
OH NO YOU DI'INT!
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
" Does this mean 98% of votes is enough to figure out how the other 2% voted?" A properly done statistical analysis points the opposite direction; a small sample, properly randomized, can figure out how the other 98 percent voted. And if the margin is, say, 70/30, I don't think we care how they voted anyway. Now, in a 51/49 split, sure. Those don't happen very often.
Well, you can't also hold an election in your household about paying taxes and expect the government to honor it when you say that 0 % here wants to pay taxes.
The problem with Sipoo was that they were total asses, not accepting that people who work in the neighboring big city may actually have the right to housing there. No, if they had it their way, they wanted to be a plot of wheat fields inside a metropolis or something. It doesn't take a genius to see that won't work.
Really, the municipal borders are human-drawn. There's no special reason to respect them. They are there for convenience of everybody. Perhaps in the perfect system you would have more say to things that happen closer to where you live. In that case I'm sure the result would have been the same. But if you start to act in ways that make the life for everybody around you inconvenient, you really have no right to expect them to treat you kindly.
( Tieto was behind this Finnish bank's software transition: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Sampo-UhOh.aspx )
No it wasn't. TietoEnator was responsible for the old, working system. The new, broken system was Danske Bank's own.