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)."

Comments

Failed to Finnish

[dov_0]

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?

Re:Failed to Finnish

[Novus]

Finnish municipal elections are always by the D'Hondt method, so the result can be strongly affected by a few additional votes. In fact, if the missing votes were all for one candidate, that candidate would have received the most votes.

Re:Failed to Finnish

[Jurily]

Finnish municipal elections are always by the D'Hondt method, so the result can be strongly affected by a few additional votes.

Doesn't really matter. If you let them vote, count all the fucking votes. It's that simple.

I have my own problems with any voting system skewing the results in favor of the two candidates most likely to win ("Don't vote on the little guy, your vote will be lost!"), but this is ridiculous.

Did they offer any reimbursement for the people whose vote they didn't count? I'd be pissed off if they did that to me. I'd also start screaming around about someone cheating, and likely sue as well.

Re:Failed to Finnish

[jaria]

> Did they offer any reimbursement for the people whose vote they didn't count?

I am considering paying 2% less taxes this year. Clearly, 2% is within the allowable government tolerances.

Re:Failed to Finnish

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's not that simple. This e-voting debate has always been tainted by a complete lack of scientific logic, which your post typifies.

No measurement is perfectly accurate. Counting votes by hand is not a perfectly accurate method. We expect computers to be perfect but the measuring system isn't perfect so the results aren't either.

It doesn't matter. Our voting system has always had a margin of error, and always will. Thankfully one court in the world understands this and is bold enough to say 2% is an acceptable error.

If the election is not close, it clearly has no effect on the end result. It can only matter if the election is close.

And here's the thing - if the election is close enough, then no system will accurately measure the result. We have a situation, well understood in the world of science, where the noise is louder than the signal. The result of any binary discriminator in this situation is effectively random.

Closely-called elections have always been randomly decided, and they will always be randomly decided.

Let's just accept this and get on with the real debate which is, what is an acceptable margin of error? Do you agree with 2% or not? What would you like the error to be? How much are you willing to spend to reduce the error?

You'll note that in this properly cast debate, anyone saying that only 0.000000% is acceptable counts as an extremist who won't be listened to.

Re:Failed to Finnish

[Jurily]

If the election is not close, it clearly has no effect on the end result. It can only matter if the election is close.

It's the principle that matters. You're basically saying they should randomly not let people in the booth saying "You're the error margin, good bye."
How would you feel?

You'll note that in this properly cast debate, anyone saying that only 0.000000% is acceptable counts as an extremist who won't be listened to.

Make a law saying anyone who didn't get their vote counted doesn't have to pay taxes until the next election. I'm sure they'll get it sorted out in no time.

Re:Failed to Finnish

[Ornedan]

2% is bloody well not an acceptable error rate when manual counting error rate is 0.5% on average. As such, the court saying 2% is acceptable is utter bullshit.

Re:Failed to Finnish

[Anonymous Coward]

> Let's just accept this and get on with the real debate which is, what is an acceptable margin of error? Do you agree with 2% or not?

Given that 1% or even 0.5% is the limit where a party can ask for recompensation for their expenses (speaking about Germany), 2% is definitely far, far too much, and obviously anything above 0.1% is too much.
But that is not the real issue: the real issue is that nobody knows or can proof why which votes were lost, and the electronic voting systems make it completely impossible to find out even if 60% of votes were lost. You can then also not determinine if there was any system or regularity in which the votes were lost. This means that just speaking statistically, the margin for error must be far lower for electronic systems in order to allow the same accuracy as traditional voting.
If someone had had the possibility to let the green party loose 2% at will it is quite likely it would never have grown - a party that now regularly gets around 10% of votes.
If you say 2% loss is acceptable with a voting system that makes reliable tracking impossible (since different to pen and paper, electrons do not leave any traces we can track these days), that means you essentially o.k. any arbitrary vote manipulation as long as it does not exceed 2%.
That is not much if all you have is a party with 60% and one with 40% but if you have e.g. 1 with 6%, 1 with 5%, 4 with 3% maybe 3 more with about 1% that is basically giving the permission to mess up the system as you like (particularly if above/below 5% decides whether you get seats in parliament or not).

Re:Failed to Finnish

[Jurily]

Given that 1% or even 0.5% is the limit where a party can ask for recompensation for their expenses (speaking about Germany)

1% in Hungary.

But that is not the real issue: the real issue is that nobody knows or can proof why which votes were lost, and the electronic voting systems make it completely impossible to find out even if 60% of votes were lost.

No, it's not impossibe. We're talking about computers here, they can be audited.

Also, I'd like to see, how

votes[canditate]+=1;

has an error margin of 2%.

Re:Failed to Finnish

[grgon]

I am considering paying 2% less taxes this year. Clearly, 2% is within the allowable government tolerances.

This is actually a really good point. Another example: if during one day in one country all the transactions in one bank contained 2% errors, that is money going to the wrong recipent, wrong amounts etc. it would be totally unacceptable. maybe if we involved a bank and put a euro coin/note in each envelope....

Re:Failed to Finnish

[BOFHelsinki]

Actually it was modded "Finny" but Slashdot got it only 98% correct, which we find perfectly acceptable.

"Finland -- the democracy where 49% decide what the other 49% can do."

What's the margin of victory?

[AuMatar]

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.

Re:What's the margin of victory?

[Anonymous Coward]

but the elections are not done only to determine who is the winner. Elections also show how much support the smaller parties and candidates have. They also show whether a smaller party or candidate suceeded in getting more votes than another smaller party or candidate. Such results can help smaller parties or candidates build coalitions, disband, get more members, or change their politics.

Re:What's the margin of victory?

[Front Line Assembly]

According to the article a few votes could have changed the results (different persons elected).

Re:What's the margin of victory?

[Card]

This was a municipal election, carried out in three small municipalities with just several thousand voters. The victory margin in those municipalities was just a few votes. This error clearly affects the outcome of the vote.

Effi's site had an english version, too:
An error margin of 2% in municipal elections ruled acceptable in Finland

Re:What's the margin of victory?

[jaria]

The margin of victory was *0* votes. There are people who got elected by roll of dice in the voting board, because they got the same number of votes as someone else.

Clearly, even one additional vote would have changed the situation.

Re:What's the margin of victory?

[BSAtHome]

It's a problem, certainly, but it may not have any bearing on the outcome of this particular election.

It doesn't matter whether the votes would have made a change or not. It is the basics of fairness that dictates that all votes should be counted. The margin of error should not play a role. If people are asked to vote, what is the problem with accepting the responsibility for counting them? The precedent set here says: we don't care about your vote since it doesn't matter. That is a very dangerous precedent because people will start losing interest and faith in the democratic system this way.

Non-electronic spoilage rate

[profplump]

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.

Re:Non-electronic spoilage rate

[raynet]

The Finnish system has very very low spoilage rate, the voting is done by writing the number of the candidate on the ballot and just about everybody does manage to do it correctly. And the margins in small municipalities are very tiny, had I gotten 7 more votes I would have been elected, and I got 3 :)

Re:Non-electronic spoilage rate

[puhuri]

The number of rejected votes has been less than 1% in most muncipal elections.

In Finnish voting, a number of choisen candidate is written in booth by pen on paperboard sheet, that is then folded, stamped by official and put into ballot box. Many of invalid votes can be considered as protest votes (vulgar drawings, names of fictional charactes), but some of votes are rejected because number cannot be clearly identified (like 1 or 7). In larger cities, there are more than 100 candidates, so numbers can be upto 3 digits.

Re:Non-electronic spoilage rate

[thesupraman]

Quite, reading through this reasonably carefully it would appear that 2% of the votes 'Were not counted at all' which from my election experience would mean that 2% of the issued/recorded voters whom entered a booth did not then result in a vote in the system.

The obvious reason for this would be that either a machine or machines were not transfered to the centralised count - something that should stick out in the paperwork like a sore thumb..

OR

2% of people did not understand/complete the voting procedure correctly - which would not be unusual at all.

It is quite common, although rather surprising, to get paper voting papers that have not been marked in any way - one can only guess that the voter got in to the booth, could not find the person/issue/whatever they thought they wanted to vote for, and didnt bother. You also get voters who do quite obviously stupid and incorrect things in marking their paper ballots, like circling the name of the candidate they support, rather than marking the box.

I would not be at all surprised with a 2% missing vote from the combination of people who just didnt finalising their vote on purpose, and people who did not correctly complete whatever the procedure was.

Neither of these is a particularly 'electronic voting' type fault - it happens all the time in paper based systems. If the numbers are much higher than tghe old style voting, then it could mean the new system is not clear or understandable enough.

Of course IF the problem is simply missing voting machine counts, then that is a whole different kettle of fish, and requires investigation.

So long as people can vote in 'privacy and anonymity' then it is damn near impossible to actually get all their votes..

Re:Non-electronic spoilage rate

[getuid()]

I don't see why this is any more or less a problem than the old method.

I do. It's because of why the spoilage occured.

In the case of paper ballots, it's easy to imagine where the spoilage comes from: thousands of helpers handle millions of pieces of paper. Either they mis-count, they accidentally destroy bills... whatever. It's easy to imagine that there is some damage, and the most likely scenario is not a systematic error or a manipulation.

In the voting machine case, it's different. There's a machine counting results. It's not supposed to miscount. There's also the machines adding the numbers and doing the math -- it's not supposed to be wrong. If it is wrong, then it's propably not because of 1000 small errors adding uncorrelated small pieces to the spoilage (like it would be in the case of the manual counting), but it's most probably because of one single error or manipulation in the system. Being one single malfunction, it is not at all likely anymore that it has nothing to do with manipulation on purpose -- on the contrary, this scenario is very possible, and more or less likely.

An analogy with weapons, to clarify (not to justify) my points: if a bow+arrow wouldn't be able to hit a 1 foot target at 1000 yards distance, you wouldn't complain. That's the limits what a bow can do, after all... But if a high-tech sniper rifle missed the same target from the same distance, you'd have all rights to complain! The gun is supposed to work orders of magnitude better, there's no room for such a big error there.

Re:Non-electronic spoilage rate

[kaip]

In the Finnish municipal elections 2008, 0.17% of the paper votes were inadvertently spoiled (unclear marking in the ballot ticket etc.) and had to be dismissed. This can be compared with the 2% of the electronic votes lost in three municipalities in which the new voting system was piloted (see Effi's Electronic Voting FAQ, in Finnish).

The total fraction of the spoiled paper votes in the municipal elections was 0.6%. Most of the dismissed paper votes were due to a deliberate action by the voter (votes for Donald Duck - a popular candidate here!, empty ballot tickets etc.). There is no evidence to support the claim that the lost electronic votes were due to a deliberate action by the voters. On the contrary, in addition to the usability problems with the voting machines, there is evidence of system malfunctions which may have contributed to the lost votes (slow response times, freezing of the voting machines during the voting etc.). Additionally, the electronic voting did allow to cast an empty vote.

Re:Non-electronic spoilage rate

[volpe]

So, your opponent got THREE TIMES as many votes (9) as you did (3), and you consider that a small margin?

Re:Non-electronic spoilage rate

[raynet]

Yes, I call that a small margin as that difference is 0.45% of total votes cast, now if I was running in those towns where 2% of votes were lost, I would be furious.

2%

[clarkkent09]

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.

Re:2%

[raynet]

It seems that the [OK] [CANCEL] buttons didn't have very good feedback and they didn't work all the time, sometimes requiring multiple clicks to register, which is why some people took their cards after clicking on OK several times.

Re:2%

[jaria]

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.

Re:2%

[legirons]

It seems that the [OK] [CANCEL] buttons didn't have very good feedback and they didn't work all the time, sometimes requiring multiple clicks to register, which is why some people took their cards after clicking on OK several times.

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.
 

Re:2%

[LateArthurDent]

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.

It all depends...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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).

Translation of article

[Novus]

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."

Handling of the problems was even a bigger mess

[jaria]

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

This is not the final decision in this matter

[jaria]

There will be an appeal to the highest court.

At least *my* vote was counted

[blind biker]

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).

Oh my...

[spazdor]

OMG...
Did you just...

If it is a first past the post system this is a problem.

OH NO YOU DI'INT!