Finnish Court Accepts E-Voting Result With 2% Lost 159
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)."
Re:What's the margin of victory? (Score:3, Informative)
but the elections are not done only to determine who is the winner. Elections also show how much support the smaller parties and candidates have. They also show whether a smaller party or candidate suceeded in getting more votes than another smaller party or candidate. Such results can help smaller parties or candidates build coalitions, disband, get more members, or change their politics.
Re:What's the margin of victory? (Score:3, Informative)
According to the article a few votes could have changed the results (different persons elected).
Re:Failed to Finnish (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Non-electronic spoilage rate (Score:5, Informative)
The Finnish system has very very low spoilage rate, the voting is done by writing the number of the candidate on the ballot and just about everybody does manage to do it correctly. And the margins in small municipalities are very tiny, had I gotten 7 more votes I would have been elected, and I got 3 :)
Re:2% (Score:5, Informative)
It seems that the [OK] [CANCEL] buttons didn't have very good feedback and they didn't work all the time, sometimes requiring multiple clicks to register, which is why some people took their cards after clicking on OK several times.
Translation of article (Score:5, Informative)
Standard disclaimer: legalese may not be 100% accurate. I am not a lawyer.
Electronic Frontier Finland ry (Effi) is shocked by today's decision by the Helsinki Administrative Court. The court downplayed the problems of e-voting and declined to annul the result of the election. Thus, the elections will not be repeated unless the Supreme Administrative Court overturns the decision. After last year's municipal elections, it was found that 232 voters' votes were lost.
Effi assisted in 16 complaints regarding e-voting in the three municipalities in which it was trialled. Based on the witness and expert statements gathered by Effi, the problems were due, amongst other things, to machines freezing at the moment of voting, inadequate testing, user interface design issues, not fixing detected problems and incorrect instructions. In some trial municipalities, even one vote could have changed the members of the council that was elected.
A central basis for the decision was that "A failure rate of slightly more than 2% can not, as such, be considered to show erroneous activity on the behalf of the election authority... The threshold for repeating an election must also be high even with respect to realising basic state rights."
Lawyer Mikko Välimäki, the complainants' advocate, comments: "The decision does not seem to be well founded. The problems are undeniable, and the election result was incorrect. The Administrative Court's line chips away at the trust in Finnish democracy. What happened to the basic rights of the "slightly more than 2%"?"
The vice chair of Effi, Ville Oksanen, wonders: "I understand that we agree that the election trials had serious problems. Now, however, the Administrative Court has accepted a situation in which it is clear that the result of the election did not correspond to the will of the voters. The last candidates to pass are within the margin of error of the system." Oksanen continues: "Not even the municipalities have denied the existence of problems in the judicial process or the possible effect of the missing votes on the results of the election. Going by the Administrative Court's logic, we could give up recounting votes, because the results don't change by more than a few votes anyway. The constitution guarantees everyone an equal right to vote. It doesn't say anything about 98%!"
Jari Arkko, who complained about the elections in Kauniainen, intends to appeal the decision: "We will study the court's decision in the next few days, but we have previously considered the matter to be so important in principle that we have reason enough to appeal to the Supreme Administrative Court." In Vihti, complainant Tero Miettinen agrees: "A badly implemented system should not decide who is elected to the council of my home town. The margin of error in the electronic voting was many times that of the traditional election system. It is hard to understand why the Administrative Court does not consider this an indication that the system has failed."
Re:Non-electronic spoilage rate (Score:4, Informative)
The number of rejected votes has been less than 1% [www.stat.fi] in most muncipal elections.
In Finnish voting, a number of choisen candidate is written in booth by pen on paperboard sheet, that is then folded, stamped by official and put into ballot box. Many of invalid votes can be considered as protest votes (vulgar drawings, names of fictional charactes), but some of votes are rejected because number cannot be clearly identified (like 1 or 7). In larger cities, there are more than 100 candidates, so numbers can be upto 3 digits.
Re:What's the margin of victory? (Score:5, Informative)
The margin of victory was *0* votes. There are people who got elected by roll of dice in the voting board, because they got the same number of votes as someone else.
Clearly, even one additional vote would have changed the situation.
Handling of the problems was even a bigger mess (Score:5, Informative)
We can never have a 100% perfect system. Paper ballots lose about 0.5% of votes in Finland. But 2% is way too much. We spent a lot of money on that system, and it gives worse results than the almost free paper ballot system (the votes are counted by volunteers).
The reasons for the mess include incompetence on the part of the ministry organizing the elections and completely ignoring the feedback from external experts prior to the election. For instance, minister of justice, Tuija Brax, painted the worries as "science fiction" just before the elections.
But I am even more stunned by the handling of the problems after they were discovered. Normally, if you get problems you try to deal with them and rectify the situation. But many of the government officials, voting boards, etc. have focused on blaming the users, explaining that 2% isn't a big deal, and attempting to avoid discussion of the actual technical problems that were discovered.
And it gets worse. My city voting board actually blamed the votes for purposefully misusing the machines so that they would appear unreliable. Conspiracy! Normally it is the crazy citizens who suspect the government of conspiracies, but this time the government thinks the citizens are conspiring against them. Maybe the officials involved should be re-allocated for JFK murder investigations...
More information here:
http://www.arkko.com/vaalit/evoting.html [arkko.com]
Re:Non-electronic spoilage rate (Score:5, Informative)
In the Finnish municipal elections 2008, 0.17% of the paper votes were inadvertently spoiled (unclear marking in the ballot ticket etc.) and had to be dismissed. This can be compared with the 2% of the electronic votes lost in three municipalities in which the new voting system was piloted (see Effi's Electronic Voting FAQ [effi.org], in Finnish).
The total fraction of the spoiled paper votes in the municipal elections was 0.6%. Most of the dismissed paper votes were due to a deliberate action by the voter (votes for Donald Duck - a popular candidate here!, empty ballot tickets etc.). There is no evidence to support the claim that the lost electronic votes were due to a deliberate action by the voters. On the contrary, in addition to the usability problems with the voting machines, there is evidence of system malfunctions which may have contributed to the lost votes (slow response times, freezing of the voting machines during the voting etc.). Additionally, the electronic voting did allow to cast an empty vote.
Re:2% (Score:2, Informative)
It seems that the [OK] [CANCEL] buttons didn't have very good feedback and they didn't work all the time, sometimes requiring multiple clicks to register, which is why some people took their cards after clicking on OK several times.
OK/Cancel buttons are a disaster-area anyway, since every OS and every application has a different idea on what order they should go in, and people get used to clicking the left/right one for OK without looking at the labels.
Re:Non-electronic spoilage rate (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, I call that a small margin as that difference is 0.45% of total votes cast, now if I was running in those towns where 2% of votes were lost, I would be furious.