Finnish E-Voting System Loses 2% of Votes 366
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."
Re:Usability Glitch? (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.
"Didn't see any need" ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:TietoEnator? Lol :o) (Score:2, Insightful)
Which brings me to a giant WTF: why introduce an electronic system, when good nordic organization will provide poll results the same day anyway?
I've been wondering the exact same thing. The other argument used was that by introducing an electronic voting system, young people would be more willing to vote. That sound like a really shitty plan, because even if they did, this would not be the case the next time because then the whole electronic voting thing would be old news. And, in any case, if people are so very little interested in the society that they don't vote if it's traditional pen-and-paper, some gimmick e-voting parade surely will not make that big a difference.
Something fishy sure is going on here, I'm tellin' ya. Maybe the system providers are FOAF of the politicians so keenly pushing this fscked-up system? Or.. they are merely nazi puppets of the near future nazi rulers we'll have?
Re:Usability Glitch? (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: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.
Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:2, Insightful)
no it's poor design and poor (probably not existent) testing.
They intended to vote so where is the buzzer/audio feedback along the different stages of the process.
How about the big warning when no vote was cast.
How about not returning the card until the proces is complete - think atm machine.
Software design these days no one pays attention to detail...
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.
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.
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.
Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:5, Insightful)
Quite simply, because they want instant results when the polls close.
Only 2% ? (Score:3, Insightful)
The UK and US voting systems deliberately throw away at least 50% of votes.
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.
Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:2, Insightful)
You're not likely to forget your money, are you?
Not really.
I remember a few years ago I had to chase someone to give him back the money he forgot to collect from the ATM after he duly collected his card. It was 200 quid.
Unfortunately, there is no limit to human stupidity.
Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:3, Insightful)
An Electronic voting system in a democracy needs to be designed in such way that 70 years old person who maybe has seen a computer couple times and 20-year-old, will have the same success rate.
There never ever should have been a button labeled "OK". Instead maybe one with "Press this and you'll vote will be registered and locked."
The machine should never have allowed the voting process to be left at that limbo state. Giving the card back actually implies to the voter that the voting has been succesfully finished if the system doesn't clearly state to the voter that his/her vote has not been registered.
This sounds like a nice feature to keep stupid people from voting.
Yes, this is a tech site but you can't honestly be that arrogant can you?
This has nothing to do with stupidity of the voters and everything with the quality level of the system design required for voting systems. And stupid people have the right to vote too.
Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:1, Insightful)
Being old or a research scientist equals stupidity?
Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:2, Insightful)
Paper ballots have to be counted by people. Lots of people. People are error-prone. And people could have agendas. Even if the risk that 1 person is making a mistake is 0.005% the risk is increased a if you have 5000 people counting votes. (It's not linear, but I can't remember enough of the statistics course to tell). This is the reason you want machines to do the counting. It's what computers do best. At least properly configured.
Using e-voting has nothing to do with "instant results", except that it's a bonus. It's to remove the uncertain, and boring, task of vote counting. I.e. people.
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.
After the initial cost of the e-voting system, including bug fixing and so on, it's a "cheap" and re-usable system. Salaries of the error-prone workers probably outweight maintenance costs by a factor of ten. E-voting is a long term investment and staring at the initial costs is useless.
Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:3, Insightful)
There ought to be some kind of test to verify the voter actually UNDERSTANDS who is voting for. Something like:
"Is Obama a Republican?"
If the voter can not properly answer the question then he forfeits his right to vote due to Mental Incompetence. Mentally-incompetent people are typically treated the same way, legally, as a minor. Minors can not vote.
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.
Slashdot party line on electronic voting (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:2, Insightful)
Paper-trail Fetish (Score:2, Insightful)
Enough of the paper-trail fetish already. As with almost every other potential failure case, a paper record of votes in this case would have accomplished absolutely nothing.
Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not sure it undermines democracy. If by democracy you mean "get the counts right".
No it not only has to be accurate, but visibly so.
Paper ballots have to be counted by people. Lots of people. People are error-prone. And people could have agendas. Even if the risk that 1 person is making a mistake is 0.005% the risk is increased a if you have 5000 people counting votes. (It's not linear, but I can't remember enough of the statistics course to tell). This is the reason you want machines to do the counting. It's what computers do best. At least properly configured.
In many places it's actually the representatives of each of the candidates that do the counting. That virtually eliminates any form of bias, as the "other side" would never stand for it.
Using e-voting has nothing to do with "instant results", except that it's a bonus. It's to remove the uncertain, and boring, task of vote counting. I.e. people.
Yes but manual counts give us the significant advantage of a number of peoeple who can verify that the count (for their counting station) was actually accurate.
Any 'valid' electronic system must have a verifiable paper trail that would have to be checked before the election is declared. It's that lack that concerns many people.
Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not sure it undermines democracy. If by democracy you mean "get the counts right".
Democracy is based on trust: trust that my vote is actually counted. Without that trust I might as well not vote. Without voting, we don't live in a democracy.
An electronic voting machine is a black box, it could be doing _anything_ it damn well pleases in there with my vote. The number of people that need to be corrupted to take control over the votes in an entire country is very, very small; maybe just one. Testing cannot reveal that (the tampering could be date-specific), and neither does opening the source (different sources could be loaded where I cannot see it). And such a subversion would, if done well, go completely unnoticed.
Compare that with people doing the counting: to subvert the process you need to corrupt _all_ people in enough counting stations to actually make a difference. A single counting station is manned by representative of all parties, as well as interested citizens, so there is virtually no chance of such a subversion going unnoticed on a nation-wide scale.
Paper ballots have to be counted by people. Lots of people. People are error-prone. And people could have agendas. Even if the risk that 1 person is making a mistake is 0.005% the risk is increased a if you have 5000 people counting votes. (It's not linear, but I can't remember enough of the statistics course to tell). This is the reason you want machines to do the counting. It's what computers do best. At least properly configured.
You are offsetting the occasional mistake in hand-counting against the possibility of completely corrupting the entire vote. I would suggest that that is the wrong priority.
Using e-voting has nothing to do with "instant results", except that it's a bonus. It's to remove the uncertain, and boring, task of vote counting. I.e. people.
And hand-counting has nothing to do with improving uncertainty, it is to remove a single point of failure from the system.
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.
Is democracy worth so little to you, that you don't even want to pay for that handful of people to do the counting?
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.
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.
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.
Great plan, really. (Score:1, Insightful)
Next up, Senators should have to make/have been given a million dollars a year before running for election, be white, Christians and have no better than a B average coming out of whatever cushy Ivy League University their upper 0.1% class family put them through with their Carbon (oil/coal/diamond/blood) Money. Outliers from this group are only allowed under affirmative action or some other silly "diversity" law, but must follow at least half of the above tenants.
Re:eVoting has many benefits beyond just tallying (Score:3, Insightful)
As a poll worker, I hate the electronic machine we have. Don't get me wrong though, I love all the the features and benefits you pointed out.
Our machines display nice, easy to read forms on the screen that are easy for a user to select and even change their mind (it even includes an audio interface for the blind). It records the vote on a pcmcia memory card locked inside and also on a paper tape hidden inside. Totaling the counts is pretty quick just as you describe.
So why do I hate these machines? I hate them because a voter that understands what is going on here has exactly zero confidence that what they selected and was displayed on the screen is what was recorded on that pcmcia memory card and the hidden paper tape. The voter can't verify that the official version of their ballot was actually recorded as they intended because they can't see the bits on that card and can't see what was printed on that hidden paper tape. If votes get recorded incorrectly it doesn't even matter if it was due to hacking (before durring or after the polling) or a bug in the software. And since nothing you are left with after the fact was verified by the voters there is no way to detect a problem. No way to do a meaningful recount.
So, how would I change it. First, I doubt any system can be perfect but the design flaw above is inexcusable. I'd keep that nice touch screen interface for all the reasons posted above. I'd eliminate the pcmcia memory card and maybe the hidden paper tape (optional). I'd add a regular printer. When the voter completes an electronic ballot it gets printed as a paper ballot all filled in as the voter wanted. The voter picks that up, looks at it and verifies that it does in fact represent their choices. Then the voter takes the paper ballot over to and inserts it into the optical scanner with a clear cover so they can see their ballot being scanned. The scanner then drops the ballot into a locked ballot box. The scanner electronically counts the votes. Humans double check by hand counting a small percentage of ballot boxes and verifying the count made at the scanner was correct. If problems are apparent with the electronic count a full recount can be done the old fashioned way with the voter verified paper ballots.
Re:The oldest democracy on the planet (Score:2, Insightful)
The people who are responding by saying something about how ancient Greece/Athens was the first democracy in my oppinion missed the point of the original poster. Regardless of whether or not one consider Athens to have been a "true democracy" it has nothing to do with the actual argument on the post:
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.
(emphasis mine)
So whatever was going on in Athens back in the the day doesn't matter since the nation (or polis) of Athens doesn't exist anymore (modern day Greece isn't the same nation) and thus is no longer functioning.