Finnish Court Dismisses E-Voting Result 114
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."
2% were lost... (Score:5, Insightful)
how many coffin nails will it take? (Score:5, Insightful)
E-voting has had more lives than a cat. It should be over, done, kaput. An experiment that failed.
Re:What was the margin of victory? (Score:5, Insightful)
In theory, because of the voting system used, 2% of the votes could have dramatic consequences. Of course, we'll never know because the votes are anonymous and the recipients secret, but if you think that quite a lot of candidates got in with just a few dozen of votes, you can clearly see how 2% could have determined a lot.
Re:how many coffin nails will it take? (Score:2, Insightful)
It still amazes me that we put full trust (and R&D $$$) into electronic banking systems yet can't get the same technology to work for something as simple as counting votes.
Re:2% were lost... (Score:3, Insightful)
If 2% of the votes were lost, how many were incorrect or not registered properly? If the system can lose votes, it can very easily put them for the wrong person as well...
All of them. The voting device had serious usability issues, enabling people to get out of the booth without registering the vote.
Re:Usability Glitch? (Score:5, Insightful)
by Antique Geekmeister (740220) on 2008-10-29 8:47 (#25552091)
The card should have been locked into the machine until the voter said 'OK' or cleared the screen, and locked it in with an alert and a deactivation warning if the person left the booth without doing either. Anyone can get confused about simple directions for an entirely new system. How many of us have tried to walk away from an ATM with our card still in it because we were distracted?
Banking doesn't usually require anonymity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:how many coffin nails will it take? (Score:4, Insightful)
It still amazes me that we put full trust (and R&D $$$) into electronic banking systems yet can't get the same technology to work for something as simple as counting votes.
"I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this--who will count the votes, and how." - J. Stalin
Electronic voting does not have an inherent paper trail.
Re:2% were lost... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Banking doesn't usually require anonymity (Score:5, Insightful)
2% creates doubt and mistrust (Score:3, Insightful)
2% creates doubt and mistrust in the election results and that is unacceptable. What if the votes were lost in a non-random fashion? What if the same e-voting system gets reused later in a case where 2% could mean the difference between a seat going to one candidate or another? What if the root cause of the loss caused other problems as well? What does it say about the quality control and security of the system? People should be able to trust the outcome of an election.
Re:Banking doesn't usually require anonymity (Score:2, Insightful)
To verify the system, only a small absolute number (not percentage) of people needs to verify it. Assume 1% of the votes are incorrect and 500 random (from the cheater's perspective) people verify their hashes. The probability that none of these are victims of a forged vote is 0.65%. If only 0.1% of the votes are tampered with, you need 5000 people to achieve a similar percentage.
Your made up number of 0.1% of the people checking the hashes will thus be very resilient for voting populations greater than 500,000.
As for preventing the insertion of fake votes, you need to publish a list of who voted, and compare the length of this list to the length of the vote list. This list can also be verified by random sampling.
Re:How hard can it be to get this right? (Score:3, Insightful)
It sure seems like an easy problem, doesn't it.
As a programming problem, it seems like an easy problem because it is. Thing is - it's not a programming problem. It's a security problem. As a security problem, the programmer is the most significant potential attacker. Does it still seem easy?
Re:How hard is it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Its actually surprisingly hard, if you start to think about it. If you compare to the paper ballot system, there are checks and balances. The different party officials and citizens can oversee the counting (in fact, they volunteer to do it). One corrupt counter does not break the system, however, because the others will catch him. And its very hard to cause a country-wide discrepancy.
If you compare an e-voting system to, say, a banking application, there's one big difference: in the banking application you WANT a secure trail of events, stored for perpetuity. In voting you want anonymous results while at the same time secure results. Its very hard to do this, as almost every design makes you trust someone in some way.
Then if you add the issue of voters not being able to verify the system for various commercial reasons... my take on this is that an e-voting system does not make sense for simple and efficient elections like the ones we have in Finland. Counting is fast, there are no reliability problems (in fact, there is a 10x higher reliability in paper ballots). Its cheap, because its mostly run by volunteers who have an incentive to participate.
Re:A bold prediction (Score:1, Insightful)
When your company name is so sullied that you need to change it, you ought to realize that you have reached the end of the line...
Re:2% were lost... (Score:1, Insightful)
In Finland, average vote loss with pen & paper was around 0.5%
Re:2% were lost... (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, no
You don't think there may be differences in how people who are "elderly or those who work in schools", "usually unemployed or work non-standard hours" and "usually work a regular day job" might react to bad UI design?
(Using the categories proposed by GP).