Top
Best
New

Posted by jjgreen 8 hours ago

Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure(www.theregister.com)
88 points | 192 commentspage 2
palata 7 hours ago|
The title is misleading. It's an e-voting PILOT. That's important. "Switzerland is running small-scale e-voting pilots in four of its 26 cantons", three of which were not affected.

From Wikipedia [1]:

> A pilot experiment, pilot study, pilot test or pilot project is a small-scale preliminary study conducted to evaluate feasibility, duration, cost, adverse events, and improve upon the study design prior to performance of a full-scale research project.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_experiment

beautiful_apple 7 hours ago||
Switzerland has been very careful/ conservative about rolling out e-voting. The same cannot be said of other jurisdictions (like Ontario's municipal elections) where adoption is very rapid and without coordination/support/standards from the provincial or federal governments.
jjgreen 7 hours ago||
Had to truncate the title since too long for HN (often the case for the Register)
palata 7 hours ago|||
And it makes it sound like a production system failed, where what actually happened is that this was a pilot that worked in 3/4 of the involved cantons and that the people who participated to it knew it was a pilot.
Alifatisk 7 hours ago|||
You cut out something that changed the message entirely
jjgreen 7 hours ago||
I thought the edit window was 15 minutes, but it seems it is an hour, so edited to restore the "pilot"
jackweirdy 7 hours ago||
It’s a nice property of elections that you can measure votes needing more intervention against the margin of victory before you decide your next step
fabiofzero 7 hours ago||
Brazil has digital voting since 1996 and it works pretty much flawlessly. I'm sure Switzerland will figure it out someday.
diego_moita 7 hours ago|
Meanwhile Brazil does full e-vote for almost 30 years collecting more than 100 million votes (that's 11 times the whole of Switzerland's population).

You'll get there Switzerland, it can be done. It is safer and faster.

beautiful_apple 7 hours ago||
Brazil's e-voting does not allow voters to vote online from home on a personal computer (like in Switzerland). It has very different requirements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Brazil

palata 7 hours ago||
And they probably started with small-scale pilots, too.
diego_moita 7 hours ago||
Yes, they did.

But I think that the main reason is that Brazil's elections were a lot dirtier and a lot more unreliable than Switzerland's.

What I mean is that the push towards e-voting is much stronger in countries with unreliable elections, because e-voting is harder to tamper than the crude ways you can defraud paper ballots.

Switzerland's and other organized countries have elections that are "good enough", so the push towards e-voting is probably not that strong.

Is the "leapfrog" concept. Sometimes it is easier to adopt newer technologies in places where the existing ones are horrible. Other examples: electronic payment systems, solar panels and EVs in India and Africa.

palata 7 hours ago||
Actually I don't understand the push towards e-voting in countries like Switzerland. E-voting can be hacked from the other side of the world, because it happens on computers. In-person voting or physical mail is much harder to hack from the other side of the world.
brainwad 7 hours ago|||
Most of the push for e-voting in Switzerland is from the Swiss abroad (10% of the electorate), who have a right to vote, but whose exercise of that right is subject to the vagaries of the international postal system. I personally have had problems with receiving postal ballots from Australia to Switzerland with not enough time to return them; presumably Swiss voters in Australia have similar problems, let alone less-developed countries.
ninalanyon 1 hour ago||
That's easily fixed by extending the deadline. No new technology is required.
brainwad 1 hour ago||
It's not necessarily easy. The timing of Australian elections from issuance of writs is limited by the constitution, and since they can occur at the discretion of the prime minister, you can't prepare for them in advance.

Swiss votes are scheduled in advance, but the explanatory material and campaign flyers still have to be made and in order to be topical you don't want to make them too early. In particular the consequences of previous votes can affect the upcoming votes, and the closest interval is only 2 months (September/November).

diego_moita 7 hours ago|||
Can't talk about Switzerland, don't know the particularities.

But in continental countries like Brazil it makes a lot of sense. It is cheaper, faster and safer.

> E-voting can be hacked from the other side of the world, because it happens on computers

How do you "hack from the other side of the world" a computer that isn't even online? True, the transmission of computed results is made online, but keeping that safe is trivial, banks do it.

palata 2 hours ago|||
> How do you "hack from the other side of the world" a computer that isn't even online?

E-voting in this case means that they can vote from their computer, ipad or mobile phone. They are connected to the internet.