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."
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.
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.
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.
Commies to blame? (Score:1, Interesting)
Considering it's these big IT corporations that have 'designed' and sold this system to local covernment... Makes me wonder how it suddenly could be a commie plot for altering the votes?
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?
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.
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)
Re:Usability Glitch? (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 didn't pay attention there, they didn't pay attention to anything the candidates said or done in the campaign or over the years. There should be somewhat of a means test to allow voting. Maybe not money or materials but something like the ability to answer a few questions or read a newspaper or maybe just being able to recite the name of the current president and vice president or whatever they call them in the finnish land.
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: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.
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.
Why are users able to pull their card prematurely? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
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:special access... (Score:3, Interesting)
Let me relate an instance of voter fraud from the 2004 election.
The problem with all these new-fangled voting ideas is that voter fraud becomes much easier to do, because like any advanced system it has more points of failure that can be exploited.
In many close elections you see the scene of lawyers and party members from all sides lining up and counting votes, the cameras are looking at the tables, the talking heads on TV are explaining how each vote is counted by three groups of people, how every vote cast is critical, hanging chads, blah blah blah, etc.
This is the misdirection. As any student of basic sleight-of-hand knows, the part that receives the most attention is not the part where the trick is taking place. The point where "anyone" can go count the votes is the part where no fraud is taking place, because it already has taken place.
You can change the outcome of an election by:
Creating more votes for yourself is a classic tactic, both legal and illegal. This is usually done with "voter drives" and bussing people to locations, raising registered voters, etc. Illegally this is done by bussing vans of bums or party supporters and paying them to vote at multiple locations, dead people voting, people in jail voting, etc. This is the primary reason some people are opposed to the idea of having voter identification laws passed, because it hampers this ability to create fictional voters.
Destroying other people's votes is difficult, because votes are much more carefully reviewed at this point. Altering the number of votes in the box, or destroying the entire pool of votes is a harder thing to achieve depending on the security measures.
Invalidating other's votes is useful because if their vote disappears or is invalidated, it makes your votes that much stronger. The vote still "exists", but doesn't count for the opponent. A version of this was seen recently where some electronic Obama votes were printing ballots for McCain. Other mechanisms are making it hard to tell which candidates the vote went for.
How this relates to the 2004 voter fraud is how the ballots were being counted in Omaha. The count was being made for overseas/absentee ballots. Those votes were being counted as they were faxed in from some collection point.
Votes, to be counted, have to be validated before they can be counted. A vote is invalid for a variety of reasons one of which is if the person chose more than one candidate for president. A VERY large number of votes were invalid from this pool of faxed in votes.
Now this wasn't a scientific experiment, this is just what was observed. It was noticed that when a ballot appeared to be left leaning for the different things be voted on (all the other usual things one votes for, judges, the legislature, amendments, etc.) both Kerry and Bush were voted for. When the ballot was right leaning, only Bush was voted for.
This was escalated as an interesting grouping of ballot issues to supervisors, however if anything was done I don't know.
To summate, no Bush type voter had any problem filling in their ballot, however Kerry type voters seemed to overwhelmingly vote for both Bush and Kerry, therefore invalidating their ballot.
Now I'm of the opinion that Democrats are politically immature in many of this political beliefs and naive in many things. I do not think, however, that they are incapable of voting nor vote with this level of failure.
Assuming those in charge were correct, that these votes were coming from a legitimate source (rather than a man-in-the-middle fake-fax type thing), I'm of the opinion that as the ballots were being faxed, they were having a mark added to Bush for any ballot that was cast for Kerry, because as they hadn't been counted yet, then the votes hadn't been declared valid/invalid. The number of votes sent was the same as the number of votes received, therefore no voter fraud had taken place, but ballot fraud had taken place.
Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps there was just a huge chunk of invalid votes all sent at once.
Re:TietoEnator? Lol :o) (Score:3, Interesting)
E-voting? No, I don't think so.
Electronic registration and verification? Yes, that has value. Historically one of the great problems with the ballot process has been excluding persons who do not have the right to vote. Such as people who are dead or imaginary or have already voted. Or in my area, people who work and shop in my state but live in a different state and would like me to pay more taxes to improve the roads and bridges they use for free.
Here's what might work, which would save the state a little money and also increase the reliability of the voting process:
Use ATM devices that read a voter registration card and a PIN, and then print a ballot that is customized to the issues appropriate to this voter (bond issue for school district A, but nothing for any other school districts, etc). The voter's "account" is adjusted to show that he has "withdrawn" his ballot and cannot vote again in this election. Included on the ballot is a machine readable serial number and timestamp of the machine that issued it. The SN/TS are printed to a paper tape that the voter can inspect through a window, and verify that his blank ballot is on record. The SN/TS are also recorded in a digital file.
This preserves a solid audit trail for a fully manual recount, if it becomes necessary. A fraudulent ballot would not have a corresponding entry on the paper tape.
We know how to preserve the integrity of ballot boxes during collection and transport to counting stations. Nothing new here: just the use of appropriate technology that reached maturity decades ago.
Optical readers would tally votes electronically. Fraudulent ballots would be identified through the failure of the SN/TS to verify against the digital files; these would be passed directly to forensics as the first stage in a criminal investigation. Valid ballots that could not be reliably read by the scanners (defaced, or write-in candidate, etc) would be kicked out for hand processing, done with well established techniques to assure reliability.
This system would decrease wait times at the polls, deliver preliminary results within hours, preserve voter anonymity, yet assure a healthy voting process. A great advantage of it is that the voter would be able to use any polling place that met his concerns about personal safety (that is sometimes an issue in the USA), or is simply convenient for him.