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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."
If the margin of victory was greater then 2 percent, then it should be non-issue as far as who is in office. But it should be fixed for the next election.
There were several issues here. First, according to some sources, a few elections were close enough that 2% may have made a difference. Second, the machines put in place did not have adequate safeguards against fraud or adequate ability to do accurate recounts. The former is enough to have to do one or two elections over, but the latter was such that the people running the elections were declared to have been potentially acting in bad faith and the equivalent of a constitutional right to equal voting was violated, requiring the process to be redone. It's sort of like throwing out a criminal case and all evidence involved when there is wrongdoing on the part of police, since you can no longer trust the other evidence in the case and as a way to discourage others from trying to profit by such actions in future.
"300 years"? Really. What, then, did the ballot act of 1872 do?
And then there is the matter of numbered ballots...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I guess the problem was that these people also "knew", and thus didn't see the need to actually test the interface on a sufficient number of people - There's a 95% change that at least 1 out of 150 random testers would fall victim to a 2% failure rate. If you allowed the testers to leave feedback, the mistakes could probably have been discovered a lot faster. I'm basing this on #27545121, which claims this was a user interface issue.
They could have put the machine up in a mall, and let people use it to leave customer feedback or something, with a chance to win a small prize.
It is of course a completely correct decision from the supreme court to re-run the elections, and we are very happy about it.
But it has been interesting to follow the developments and the various attempts to avoid this outcome.
Before the elections, the minister of justice, Tuija Brax claimed any possible problems were "science fiction". After the elections and when the problems were announced, she has not been a support of new elections, just stating that the courts need to decide. However, she was quick to launch an internal investigation and fire the Director of Elections. Not sure the director was really the true guilty person here, but at least a scapegoat had been found...
The city voting boards very resisting new elections for the last second. They came up with interesting claims to prevent this from happening. One claim that we've heard often -- even after the decision -- is that the new elections do not matter, because the party situations would not change. Well, they were missing the minor issue that in Finland the election system is based on voting on persons, not parties. Some of us do care about who we vote there. A more sinister claim was that the voters had conspired to misuse the voting system on purpose, to show that it was unreliable (!). Now, talk about science fiction, maybe these guys could be of some use in the JFK murder investigation? Not to mention the fact that a correctly implemented voting system should not be vulnerable to such misuse.
The three cities involved are now extremely unhappy with the ministry, as the law requires them to pay for the new elections. The ministry has promised an extra budget to help out... though in my mind, the architects and vendors of the system should get to pay.
Its also been extremely difficult to get any information from the government on the details of the system. The local EFF wanted to take a look before the elections, but was refused (or impossible NDAs were requested). I made an official request to get the cost information of the entire project, and the government claimed that they have no such information. One number that has been circulated in the press was 700 000 euros, but that seems low, given that a large number of design and specification work went in, even at the ministry level not to mention the vendors.
All in all, a happy outcome:
- director of elections fired :-)
- minister is now pro-open source and paper trail
- general knowledge of possible problems in e-voting was increased in the country
- elections are re-run
However, everyone is quite focused on the specific bugs we experienced, thinking that individual bugs can easily be fixed. I'm more worried about the process and the way that these things are done. I don't see a way to avoid bugs next time either, for instance. Lack of verifiability, openness, government not listening to citizens or outside experts, blind acceptance of vendor sales pitches, lack of sensible motivation for the entire effort are the worrisome aspects.
And besides that is not even the point in my opinion. I was candidate in our municipality (but not in those in question) and I couldn't care less if one or two votes were missing. The issue I think is that we can now point our fingers and say "There, there is the problem. Now fix it!" and because this was forced on us by our goverment it is the goverment's job to fix the problem. So it is no matter if 1, 2, 3 or 50 percent of votes were lost. Just fix the damn problem and be done with it!
Of course fixing the problem means re-election to those municipalities. This way we get back to the democratic way of voting which how law writers meant it to happen when they wrote our Vaalilaki (law about elections) minus those stupid e-voting changes that were made in 2006 by our former parliament (and promoted by Tuija Brax).
You don't know what you don't know.