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Finnish Court Dismisses E-Voting Result

Posted by kdawson on from the go-back-jack-do-it-again dept.

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."

6 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What was the margin of victory? by Quothz · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  2. Most still voted with traditional methods by sakari · · Score: 4, Informative

    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 ?

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  3. From EFFI by Razalhague · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  4. More Info in English by pookie13 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually the machines were supplied by local company called Tieto.

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

  5. Re:Banking doesn't usually require anonymity by Sheafification · · Score: 5, Informative

    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]

  6. News in English by kaip · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.