Finnish Court Dismisses E-Voting Result

wizzor writes in with a follow-up on the Finnish municipal election in which 2% of the votes were lost by a defective e-voting system, and which the Helsinki Administrative Court had found acceptable. Now the Supreme Administrative Court of Finland has rejected the election results (original in Finnish; bad Google translation here) and ordered the election to be re-run. The submitter adds, "Apparently 98% of the votes isn't enough to determine how the remaining 2% voted, after all."

Comments

Re:What was the margin of victory?

[Quothz]

If the margin of victory was greater then 2 percent,

It was not, as best as I can tell from the translation:

Kauniainen municipality electronically of the votes lost to two percent, and for missing votes in the number would have been enough change in the outcome of the elections.

Most still voted with traditional methods

[sakari]

Just to clarify on this, most still voted with the traditional pen & paper methods. I guess E-voting was tested in some places. The finnish E-voting system was programmed by TietoEnator, which has had some questionable results in the past too in delivering working software. Still they get a lot of the government related jobs .. gee, wonder why ?

From EFFI

[Razalhague]

Here's an article in non-google-translated English. Also contains some other links in English.

More Info in English

[pookie13]

Actually the machines were supplied by local company called Tieto.

More about the case in English
Yle News
Helsingin Sanomat
Newsroom Finland

Re:What was the margin of victory?

[Anonymous Coward]

In municipal elections of Finland, each municipality chooses it's leaders. The amount of depends on the size of the municipality but in mine (Vantaa), there are 67 representatives for less than 200 000 people and not nearly everyone votes (it's closer to 100 000 people voting).

Add to that that we use different system than the USA. The person who gets most votes within any given party gets all the votes given for that party. The person who would have gotten second most votes gets half of the votes given to the whole party, the next person gets one third... And each politicians votes counted like that they are put against each other and the people with most votes at that point get the seats.

And we don't vote between two parties but a lot of them. In my municipality, there are representatives of 7 parties (and one chosen from outside party lists).

So a few votes can often completely change what parties get to be in power AND which representatives get in.

Re:Banking doesn't usually require anonymity

[Sheafification]

If you gave up secret voting, you could likely make a 'secure enough' voting system, since anyone could check their own vote in the system.

There's no need to give up on secret voting to get this. Thanks to advances in cryptography we can have secret *and* verifiable ballots. An example implementation can be found at Helios voting. Also, check out a description of a paper based system: Scratch and Vote [PDF]

Quick and dirty translation

[Card]

The Supreme Administrative Court ruled that the municipal elections will be renewed at Karkkila, Kauniainen and Vihti. Last autumn 232 votes were lost in the three municipalities that participated in the electronic voting pilot.

The court annulled the election results and ordered the election to be held again. In its summary, the court finds that the errors in the e-voting system, the insufficent instructions and the large amount of lost votes mean that the election wasn't properly held.

16 citizens appealed about the election results, some of whom were also candidates in the election. The previous appeal the Helsinki Administrative Court didn't result in the rejection of election results, as the Administrative Court did not consider the voting problems serious enough.

That verdict wasn't satisfactory to the appellants, who took the matter to the Supreme Court. Two percent of the votes were lost in the municipality of Kauniainen; the difference would have affected the outcome.

Minister Tuija Brax (Green party) - one of the main proponents of the highly controversial e-voting system - said that she was happy with the decision. Before the court's ruling came in, the minister refused to comment about the necessity of holding a new election, as such thing was impossible [without court order]. Before the election, minister Brax had said that all the [proposed] problem scenarios with the election system were pure "science fiction".

The story isn't that well written. The system allowed the user to remove his ID card before the vote was registered. The lack of a paper trail is a large problem, and the lack of openness in the design doesn't help to gain the users' trust. Further, the system was designed by Tieto Oy (formerly TietoEnator), also responsible for the new systems at Sampo Bank (with numerous login problems, XSS exploits and such). Vestigia terrent.

News in English

[kaip]

Some news in English about the court decision:

Finnish e-voting results annulled, municipalities to hold new elections by Electronic Frontier Finland ry (Effi), the best summary in English, IMO;
Helsingin Sanomat;
Helsinki Times;
The Brad Blog;
NewsRoom Finland;
YLE; and
Turre (the lawyers that won the case).

The voting system was provided by Tieto and Scytl. In their News Page, Scytl declares: "Scytl's Pnyx.core successfully used in local elections in Finland" Shouldn't they update this...? It is even possible that the 2% of the votes lost was due to the Pnyx.core, instead of usability issues with the voting terminals, as has been commonly assumed - who knows.