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Finnish E-Voting System Loses 2% of Votes
Posted by
Soulskill
on Wed Oct 29, 2008 01:11 AM
from the in-america-we-call-that-the-margin-of-error dept.
from the in-america-we-call-that-the-margin-of-error dept.
kaip writes "Finland piloted a fully electronic voting system in municipal elections last weekend. Due to a usability glitch, 232 votes, or about 2% of all electronic votes were lost. The results of the election may have been affected, because the seats in municipal assemblies are often decided by margins of a few votes. Unfortunately, nobody knows for sure, because the Ministry of Justice didn't see any need to implement a voter-verified paper record.
The ministry was, of course, duly warned about a fully electronic voting system, but the critique was debunked as 'science fiction.'
There is now discussion about re-arranging the affected elections. Thanks go to the voting system providers, Scytl and TietoEnator, for the experience."
Related Stories
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Finnish Court Accepts E-Voting Result With 2% Lost 159 comments
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)."
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Finnish Court Dismisses E-Voting Result 114 comments
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."
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Usability Glitch? (Score:4, Interesting)
"It seems that the system required the voter to insert a smart card to identify the voter, type in their selected candidate number, then press "ok", check the candidate details on the screen, and then press "ok" again. Some voters did not press "ok" for the second time, but instead removed their smart card from the voting terminal prematurely, causing their ballots not to be cast."
No. This isn't a glitch nor a problem with the machines. 98% of the voters got it right. That means that the directions were pretty clear.
This sounds like a nice feature to keep stupid people from voting.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But there are no dimpled chads to interpret in my candidate's favor....
We have seen this before. Unfortunately, the sentiment isn't "if your too stupid to work the machine, your too stupid to vote", it is more like "the dumber the better so we need to design everything so that not only the smart people can figure it out but the stupid and high people too".
I guess having the fate of your country decided by people who can't read directions is really important. I know it isn't popular but you know that if they
Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a great idea. You realize, of course, that people would immediately start adding additional questions and turning away people who don't give the right answer. Two personal favorites are "Who are you going to vote for?" and "What color is your skin?"
The problem with any type of merit based system, is that the "merit" will quickly become subjective to the advantage of the people who get to decide what the "merit" is.
In other words, that's a simple recipe for corruption.
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Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:4, Interesting)
Especially the elderly in this case. They are the group of people who pay the most attention to politics and have the least experience with computers. If it's not intuitive to the largest group of people that will be using it it's a bad interface.
Won't somebody think of the elderly?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No. This isn't a glitch nor a problem with the machines. 98% of the voters got it right. That means that the directions were pretty clear.
If this is true, then a 2% failure rate would be extremely low in comparison to traditional paper ballot systems. Which is not to say that the result of an unaudited electronic voting system is actually trustworthy.
Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually ministry of justice itself described 2% failure rate as "very high" compared to ordinary paper ballot. In Finland an ordinary failure rate for paper ballots cast would afaik be around 0,5% and that includes Donald Duck and offensive drawings, which are not available to evoters.
One of the pro-evoting arguments was that we get significantly _lower_ failure rates compared to paper ballots. Apparently that was not the case...
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Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:5, Interesting)
I keep hearing this argument about evoting, that it has a lower failure rate.
Can someone please find an actual study that confirms this? Or are they just hoping if something's repeated often enough it's taken as fact?
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Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:5, Funny)
It's probably one of those things that works in theory and blows up in operation. I guess you can say it looked good on paper.
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Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually ministry of justice itself described 2% failure rate as "very high" compared to ordinary paper ballot. In Finland an ordinary failure rate for paper ballots cast would afaik be around 0,5% and that includes Donald Duck and offensive drawings, which are not available to evoters.
Only half of 1%?! Wow. Finnish voters must be much more careful (or draw less Donald Ducks) than Australian voters then. Or perhaps, it's the result of compulsory voting, or that our exhaustive preferential system is a little more complicated. We get informal voting rates around the order of 5% (historical data here [aec.gov.au]), so 2% looks pretty low to me.
One of the pro-evoting arguments was that we get significantly _lower_ failure rates compared to paper ballots.
Informality (failure) seems a far lesser problem than trust to me. We have a paper ballot (but are experimenting with evoting for the blind). The ballot boxes are not transported, but counted at the voting place (usually the local school), and while the votes are counted 'scrutineers' from each party stand over the shoulder of each vote counter casting an eagle eye on every vote counted, noting what the counter writes down and disputing any suspect votes for the other side. Perhaps Finland doesn't do this , which would account for our higher informality rates.
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Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:4, Informative)
"Electronic voting has received significant recent media coverage, and, with the Internet becoming more pervasive, the topic will continue to receive much attention. It must be recognised that a lot of the hype being generated is by the vendors of electronic voting systems.
There are currently a range of issues associated with the introduction of electronic voting and vote counting. Each of these needs to be identified and strategies put in place to resolve them.
The possible starting points within Australia, recommended in this report, have significant business cases for providing alternative technical options to voters in order to strengthen the democratic process.
This paper does not suggest that Australian electoral authorities should at this stage embark on a program to fully replace the easily understood, publicly and politically accepted efficient, transparent paper ballot system that currently exists."
Translation for Aussies: "Tell Diebold they're dreaminn...". Further skimming of the report shows that electronic voting has been used as a successfull option in certain circumstances, such as assisting blind people to vote in secret.
Parent
Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:5, Informative)
As an election vote counter I can assure that out of the approximately 7000 votes that went thru my hands during the counting, only 9 or 10 were that ambiguous that it couldn't be reliably placed to one single candidate. Those ambiguous votes go to the board of election officials that will ultimately decide whether it's a valid vote (and who has the voter voted for) or not. Other invalid votes were maybe 5 times as common. Most of the time it's a question of whether the number is "1 or 7?" and other common problems are "6 or 0?" and "5 or 6?"
The Finnish counting system was developed during times of great distress and has stood the test of time. It was good right after the civil war and therefore it's good for peaceful times too:
The votes are first grouped by candidate, then counted twice by separate persons and invalid or ambiguous votes taken aside. If the numbers differ, they're counted again by two separate persons. Then the count is recorded on two separate forms held by secretaries and those forms are cross-validated against each other.
After this, the votes are given to second counting group selected at random (obviously different from the first group) and counted again, with a possibility to take aside votes they found invalid that were accepted previously but not vice versa. If this verification count differs at all from the first count, the number of votes for candidate will be verified by counting again the number of votes for that particular candidate and if the first count seems to have been erroneous it'll be counted for the third time by a third group. Finally the invalid votes will be considered and decided whether it is an acceptable vote or not by higher election officials. Each party attending the elections have a right to set observators to the counting procedures but at times like these I saw none personally.
This whole procedure makes it really hard to cheat in the vote counting unless you're using e-voting where officials just download the XML, turn it into a PDF and print it. Then they tell us that this is the result. I'd love to link to the news video where they did that but unfortunately I'm unable to find it right now.
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The video (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:5, Insightful)
If only it was. I really don't get e-voting. Why do people insist on using these highly complex, extremely expensive systems when the simple approach (write an X in a box on a piece of paper) works well and has done for hundreds of years, in the UK anyway.
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Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite simply, because they want instant results when the polls close.
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Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does it really matter if you have them instantly - as opposed to the next morning? And sacrifice trust in the validity of the election for such a small convenience?
If you have a truly verifiable e-Voting system with a paper trail, the final, binding results aren't faster either - because a few districts will still have to be counted manually to verify the machine count.
It's insanity. There is no advantage to electronic voting. It's expensive, complicated and prone to failure and manipulation on so many levels, it's obscene. It undermines democracy.
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Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:4, Insightful)
Paper ballots have to be counted by people. Lots of people. People are error-prone.
With the right process, you can make manual counting almost error- and tamper-proof. First, the counting is done in public. Representatives from each party are present, and anyone can watch. Second, the votes are counted twice, by different people. If there is a difference, the count is repeated.
This is the reason you want machines to do the counting. It's what computers do best. At least properly configured.
But it's not transparent. The counting is not public. The machine is a black box. Sure, it gets certified by an accredited agency - but they only test a sample, not every machine that gets used. In the end, you can only hope that your vote gets counted by a "properly configured" machine, without any possibility to verify the result. (Unless you have a paper trail machine. Which again would have to be counted manually, defeating the purpose of the machine in the first place.)
And is e-voting that expensive? Really? Compared to having thousands of workers and supervisors spend hours upon hours counting and recounting paper votes? I doubt that.
Voting machines are very expensive, not least because of all the auditing and certification that comes along with them. They need to be supported and maintained as well. Election workers, on the other hand, don't get paid (at least here in Germany), they're volunteers. The bulk of the cost is in the printing of the ballots and some bureaucracy. And even with e-Voting, some ballots will have to be printed for absentee voters, so the initial printing cost is there anyway.
Even if in the long run voting machines should prove cheaper (which I don't believe) - I feel that having a proven, transparent, trusted, publicly verifiable voting system should be worth the cost.
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Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why you don't have just one person doing a particular task, you have several people do it and compare results.
Come on, this isn't rocket science.
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Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:4, Informative)
In Spain the polls close at 8pm and typically 90% of the votes have been counted by 11:30pm, 95% one hour later and 98% by 3am. This is a country with 45 million inhabitants.
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Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:5, Insightful)
Cite please.
"Which is not to say that the result of an unaudited electronic voting system is actually trustworthy."
If the voter (usually via thier representative) can't determine that the election procedure is trustworthy then by default it isn't.
PS: To the OP and others who keep making the suggestion that "stupid people shoudn't be allowed to vote" - I submit that they are petitioning to disenfanchise themselves but are too stupid to realise it.
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Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:5, Funny)
Press OK to Finnish?
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Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:5, Funny)
Damn. I meant to post that as an Anonymous Coward.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like a great system. There's no way that a despotic government would ever bind the smart card ID with the vote and "re-educate" you after the election.
Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't a glitch nor a problem with the machines.
Yeah, the good old "blame the user" solution, its after all just democracy that is at stake...
Why is it even possible for the user to eject the card before stuff is done? Any half decent ATM doesn't allow that, it holds the card inside until everything is finished. Why doesn't the voting machine do the same? Seems to me to be a pretty clear case of a badly designed system.
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Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:4, Informative)
This sounds like a nice feature to keep stupid people from voting.
Spoken like a true, arrogant techie.
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Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.hs.fi/keskustelu/Brax%3A+Vaalitulosta+ei+voi+perua+hukka%E4%E4nien+takia/thread.jspa?threadID=148607&tstart=0&sourceStart=40&start=60 [www.hs.fi]
username Jones is the commenter, it's in Finnish, so here's a summary:
Commenter says she is a young female with university degree from Kauniainen who tried electronic voting with poor results. The voting machine had responsiveness issues: first the machine refused to register input of the candidate number, and after numerous presses and waiting the machine responded. The commenter then pressed the "ok" button, nothing happened. She pressed it again, harder, and pressed more times, until after several minutes of trying the buttonpress was registered. Then a screen popped up with the name of the candidate and the user was prompted again to press OK to accept the vote. Same problem with the OK button again, but she managed to get it to register after a long time of trying and waiting for the machine to respond.
If this is accurate, it's not unreasonable to think people may have thought the machine isn't even supposed to show the candidate number chosen on-screen after choosing, or that either of the OK presses aren't actually supposed to result in any response from the machine. 2% failures with these kinds of problems doesn't sound so strange.
Parent
Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:5, Insightful)
Holy shit. You have to use a smartcard to vote? Can it be tracked to a specific voter? Or rather, are any mechanisms implemented to make sure it can't be? If not, this is an even bigger WTF than losing a couple of votes.
Parent
I was there .. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm living in one of those three experimental places and when I went to vote they offered me electrical version. I told 'em to frack off and give me true democratic way to vote because electronic one is very bad and unreliable. How do I know that communists ain't gonna change my vote?
Anyway, I made a nice scene there and few people turned away from voting electronic. I felt good .. a true savior of democratic society.
Re:Commies to blame? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
the stats (Score:5, Informative)
Municipality / Number of votes given / number of lost votes / lowest number of votes for elected person
Vihti: 7087 / 122 / 77
Kauniainen: 2982 / 61 / 49
Karkkila: 2165 / 49 / 35
"Didn't see any need" ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Paper ballots (Score:5, Interesting)
Writing a number to a piece of paper has worked here in Finland for over hundred
years now so I really don't see the need for e-voting. Also the e-voting system
has been implemented by one of the crappiest IT-companies ever, TietoEnator, whose
main areas of expertise are: missing deadlines, underestimating budgets and designing
the worst and unusable UIs for the simplest of applications.
Re:Paper ballots (Score:4, Interesting)
My teacher in school had a favorite story about how the French king in the 1800's replaced the silverware with aluminium cutlery. I don't know if it is a true story, but I do know that the history teachers of the 2100's will have silly and true stories to tell to the kids...
Back in the 1800's, aluminum was several hundred times more valuable than gold because of how primitive and expensive the extraction and purification techniques were.
Aluminum cutlery would be seen as an exceedingly opulent dining room appointment.
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voting machines sales that go to the lowest bidder (Score:3, Funny)
I guess that's what you get when you get a system made as cheaply as possible.
If they really wanted a good system, they should have looked up who makes those ATM machines for banks.
Or at the very least, those automate ticket vendors at the movie theater. Even those have a goddamn paper trail. What the hell, do those just cost TOO much to deploy?
Re:voting machines sales that go to the lowest bid (Score:5, Funny)
What? Like Diebold?
Parent
Re:voting machines sales that go to the lowest bid (Score:4, Funny)
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Paper is no panacea (Score:3, Insightful)
All the people who talk about e-voting want a paper record. But that has its own problems, the main one being the same problem as any voting system:
How do you know if your vote is registered correctly or not?
With a secret ballot, there is no transparency. The only thing you can verify is that approximately the same number of people that went into the machine cast a vote. And at least in the US, there's no requirement that you actually cast a vote when you're in the booth, as far as I can tell. I've never tried to walk out without voting, but I expect there's no way they can force you to vote.
Are the tallies wrong? How can you tell, except by interrogating every voter...which wouldn't work, because voters may lie or change their vote when asked what/whom they voted for.
In fact, how many paper ballots are invalidated because the voter voted for multiple candidates or otherwise invalidated their ballot? 2% may be low compared to real paper ballots.
e-voting doesn't make fraud any more or less difficult. It just makes things less transparent, and probably makes fraud easier.
Instead of having to print and fill out tens of thousands of ballots, register lots of dead people, or stuff ballot boxes, all of which have severe logistical problems and can be traced with a bunch of work, all you need to do perform e-fraud voting is compromise a couple of computers up in the food chain. There is no reliable auditability for e-voting unless you remove the secret ballot requirement...and even then, it's all plastic anyway. Logs (and audit logs) are a lot easier to fake than tens or hundreds of thousands of paper ballots. The latter requires coordination among large numbers of people; e-voting fraud just requires a couple of focused and motivated geeks. Bits are bits, baby, and our jobs is to make sure the bits are in the right order.
i'd trust paper ballots over any kind of e-voting any day. It's not hard to design a ballot that doesn't allow hanging chads. It's probably impossible to design a computer system that can't be compromised by someone with enough motivation.
Re:Paper is no panacea (Score:5, Insightful)
How do you know if your vote is registered correctly or not?
You stand there and watch while they do the counting. The whole point of pen&paper is that the voter themselves can verify that the voting process happens correctly, everything that isn't pen&paper adds a layer of intransparency that makes it much harder or impossible for the voter to verify the voting process is going as advertised.
e-voting doesn't make fraud any more or less difficult. It just makes things less transparent, and probably makes fraud easier.
E-Voting doesn't only make fraud easier, it makes large scale fraud possible in the first place. With paper you will have a really though time manipulating more then a single ballot box, with E-Voting on the other side you can do large scale fraud pretty easily when you sit at the right spot.
The good thing about pen&paper is that it works even when you can't trust the government, it of course doesn't stop fraud in that case, but it makes it much easier to detect.
Parent
The oldest democracy on the planet (Score:4, Interesting)
Since for some reason the cliche' in American media is that the USA are the oldest functioning democracy on the world, you may actually learn something today: Finland is. Finland introduced universal suffrage and the right to run for office for women in 1906. The USA as a whole can be counted as a democracy since 1964, when the blacks in the South states were finally allowed to vote and run for office and poll taxes were abolished (though most states had universal suffrage and right to run, but there is no such thing as a democracy for the few).
Sad to see that a nation with such a history is going down the drain of electronic voting...
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
actually, athens is.
Only 2% ? (Score:3, Insightful)
The UK and US voting systems deliberately throw away at least 50% of votes.
Why are users able to pull their card prematurely? (Score:3, Interesting)
So to summarize (Score:4, Interesting)
One group told the Finnish government that they would be able to count votes by harnessing the movement of subatomic particles to display ephemeral text and shapes, to automatically sense human touch, to follow a pre-programmed decision script written in advance and placed into microscopic internal storage, and to protect their results by encoding them mathematically.
Another group explained some of the reasons why this might not all work perfectly.
And it wasn't until the second group chimed in that some wiseass said "hey, that sounds like science fiction!" ...
Well, I feel a little better about my own government now. That's kinda nice, I guess.
Re:More information here (Score:5, Informative)
From the summary, it seems that they're defining "lost" as just "the voter intended to cast a vote for the office, but none registered", and include those caused by user error (the voter pulling out the voting card before confirming their vote, or failing to confirm their vote altogether).
In that sense, the problem seems not to be electronic voting so much as just a poor set of instructions. Poorly designed ballots in other places can lead to a similar level of "lost" votes -- for example in the U.S. state of North Carolina, about 2.5%-3% of ballots [miamiherald.com] in presidential races fail to register a vote for President, compared to 1.1% in other states. The primary culprit? A poorly designed ballots where voters THINK they're casting a straight-ticket vote for every office, but in reality are casting one for every office except President.
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Re:More information here (Score:5, Interesting)
the problem seems not to be electronic voting so much as just a poor set of instructions.
Check out "usability" - eg Donald Norman. If you need to rely on detailed instructions, then you've got a usability issue.
Truth is, we don't know the intentions of those who withdrew their card early. But they were told that they had to press "Cancel" to cancel their vote. As they didn't "follow the instructions" for either voting or not voting, I'd say there's a usability problem.
(and yes, I know people don't always follow instructions on simple paper ballots)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The original Ministry of Justice announcement [www.om.fi] (in Finnish) states: "A total of 12234 electronic votes vere cast in the electronic voting pilot of the 2008 municipal elections. - -"
232 is about 2% of 12234 and therefore the summary is correct.
According to the same announcement the total number of votes in the three municipalities in which the voting system was piloted was 21073 (Karkkila 4251, Kauniainen 4843, Vihti 11979), i.e., 8839 of all voters cast a paper ballot. (The voters could choose between the tr
Re:special access... (Score:4, Informative)
Why are only special people privileged to counting? Can they not be bought?
There are no special people. Counting the votes has to be done in public, you can go there and watch.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
As it is it appears there was no feedback or indication that there was a final step needed after selecting the correct candidate.