EFFI: Finnish e-voting fiasco: votes lost

[Juha-Matti Laurio <juha-matti.laurio () netti fi>]

"A fully electronic voting system was piloted in the Finnish municipal elections on the 26th of October, 2008.

Electronic Frontier Finland (EFFI) had criticised the pilot program for years, recently releasing a report on its 
deficiencies.

Today, the Ministry of Justice revealed that due to a usability issue, voting was prematurely aborted for 232 voters.
The pilot system was in use in three municipalities;
this amounts to about 2 per cent of the electoral roll. Seats in the municipal assemblies are often determined by 
margins of only a couple of votes.

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.

This usability issue was exacerbated by Ministry of Justice instructions, which specifically said that in order to 
cancel the voting process,
the user should click on "cancel" and after that, remove the smart card. Thus, some voters did not realise that their 
vote had not been registered."
--clip--

More at
http://www.effi.org/blog/2008-10-28-finnish-evoting-votes-lost.html

This was slashdotted on Wed 29th Oct too

Juha-Matti
_______________________________________________
Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts.
https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec
Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.