Honest Voting

Finland will try out electronic voting during its October 2008 elections. Only people entitled to vote in the Finnish cities of Karkkila, Kauniainen, and Vihti will get to use the pilot system, which will be available during the advance voting period of October 15 to 21 and at the regular election day polling stations on October 26. Traditional voting by paper ballot will also be allowed. (That four-day gap between advance voting and the official election day must make their television coverage of elections very interesting, if advance totals are released to the public before election day.) Here’s how Finland’s Ministry of Justice reports the system will work:

When voting electronically, the voter will, upon establishing proof of identity, receive a voting card on which his or her data are recorded. The voter inserts the card in the card reader in the voting terminal, presses the number of the candidate on the touch screen and approves it.

The secrecy of the election process is equally well protected in electronic voting as in traditional ballot voting. The vote and the social security number of the voter are registered in the electronic ballot box of the Ministry of Justice via the voting terminal in such a way as to make it impossible to combine the two.

The core elements of the electronic voting system are based on the Linux operative system. The voting system is supplied to the Ministry of Justice by TietoEnator and the data security solution is based on a product of the company Scytl . In the spring of 2008 the Department of Mathematics at the University of Turku will perform an independent assessment of electronic voting after which possibly necessary amendments will be made to the system.

Following up on that last sentence:

The Ministry of Justice of Finland has successfully completed the acceptance testing process for Scytl’s Pnyx, which will be implemented in the Finnish local elections in October 2008, representing the first e-voting experience in Finland. The acceptance testing was witnessed by eleven representatives from the following municipalities: Helsinki, Espoo, Karkkila, Vihti, Kauniainen and Tampere. Scytl has partnered for this project with TietoEnator, the largest system integrator in Finland.

I’d feel a lot happier about this if ES&S weren’t Scytl’s partner in the Finnish election tryouts. This is the ES&S I know.

Meanwhile, Electronic Frontier Finland (Effi) , a Finnish association for promoting digital rights, sent a request for information to the Finnish Ministry of Justice back in February . The ministry’s response was that documentation could not be provided because it would violate the vendors’ trade secrets. Doesn’t that sound familiar? [Note: there’s no permalink to this story on the home site; look for the February 7, 2008 bulletin in the Legal News column on the right.]

Effi, therefore, has only analyzed the system as far as high-level documents from the Ministry of Justice and a U.S. patent held by Scytl will permit it, according to Legislationline. Effi expects that the system will not utilize a voter-verified paper ballot system or an electronic receipt system.

In traditional Finnish elections, manual vote counting, mandatory repeat counting, and publication of the results are overseen by representatives of the competing political parties at each polling station. Ah, but electronic voting is so…so shiny!

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