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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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%.
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!
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."