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:Non-electronic spoilage rate (Score:3, Interesting)
Quite, reading through this reasonably carefully it would appear that 2% of the votes 'Were not counted at all' which from my election experience would mean that 2% of the issued/recorded voters whom entered a booth did not then result in a vote in the system.
The obvious reason for this would be that either a machine or machines were not transfered to the centralised count - something that should stick out in the paperwork like a sore thumb..
OR
2% of people did not understand/complete the voting procedure correctly - which would not be unusual at all.
It is quite common, although rather surprising, to get paper voting papers that have not been marked in any way - one can only guess that the voter got in to the booth, could not find the person/issue/whatever they thought they wanted to vote for, and didnt bother. You also get voters who do quite obviously stupid and incorrect things in marking their paper ballots, like circling the name of the candidate they support, rather than marking the box.
I would not be at all surprised with a 2% missing vote from the combination of people who just didnt finalising their vote on purpose, and people who did not correctly complete whatever the procedure was.
Neither of these is a particularly 'electronic voting' type fault - it happens all the time in paper based systems. If the numbers are much higher than tghe old style voting, then it could mean the new system is not clear or understandable enough.
Of course IF the problem is simply missing voting machine counts, then that is a whole different kettle of fish, and requires investigation.
So long as people can vote in 'privacy and anonymity' then it is damn near impossible to actually get all their votes..
Re:2% (Score:3, Interesting)
There were multiple problems. Bad user interface design, which allowed modes where the votes don't get registered. Machines becoming frozen at the time of the voting process, making it impossible to press the OK button. Instructions which stated to press OK once, when you had to press it twice. And so on.
The most serious issue is that if the machine freezes for several minutes, the voter does not know what to do. If he pulls the card out before the machine returns to life and you can press the 2nd OK, your vote was lost.
No one really knows what happened why the 2% of votes were lost. I presume it is a combination of people simply walking out in the middle of the voting process, machine hangups, and people misunderstanding what they had to do, and possibly some yet unknown problems.
By the, none of the problems described above were in dispute. The court only decided that despite the problems, the result stands.
This is not the final decision in this matter (Score:2, Interesting)
There will be an appeal to the highest court.
At least *my* vote was counted (Score:3, Interesting)
Luckily, I am one of those who voted with pen and paper. From what I've heard, the electronic voting system was fairly complicated, and my guess is that I could have fallen victim of it.
The candidate I voted for didn't get through. I think I'll blame it on the fucking electronic voting (I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact that he promoted a rabidly anti-car and pro-cycling agenda).
Re:What's the margin of victory? (Score:3, Interesting)
It doesn't matter whether the votes would have made a change or not. It is the basics of fairness that dictates that all votes should be counted. The margin of error should not play a role. If people are asked to vote, what is the problem with accepting the responsibility for counting them? The precedent set here says: we don't care about your vote since it doesn't matter. That is a very dangerous precedent because people will start losing interest and faith in the democratic system this way.
Re:Failed to Finnish (Score:2, Interesting)
I am considering paying 2% less taxes this year. Clearly, 2% is within the allowable government tolerances.
This is actually a really good point. Another example: if during one day in one country all the transactions in one bank contained 2% errors, that is money going to the wrong recipent, wrong amounts etc. it would be totally unacceptable. maybe if we involved a bank and put a euro coin/note in each envelope....
Re:2% (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
If you color the ok button green and the cancel button red is there any culture for which that would seem backward? I honestly don't know the answer to that, but the convention of "green=ok, red=pay attention, something's wrong" might be universal.