evoting pilots in Finland

The Finnish government are piloting a DRE evoting system in their October elections. Electronic Frontier Finland's (EFFi) have been looking at the system.

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Electronic Frontier Finland's (Effi's) 'shadow report' on the Finnish e-voting pilot has been translated into English and is available now on Electronic Frontier Finland web pages.

The original Finnish version was published on the 19th of June, 2008. The English version has been updated to include commentary on the University of Turku audit report.

Finland is piloting a direct recording electronic (DRE) type, polling station based (non-remote) e-voting system in its municipal elections in October 2008. In the proposed system, we argue that ensuring the correctness of the results is extremely difficult. The voting results may be affected by multiple components of the e-voting system, and observing the counting process of ballots is impossible in the traditional sense. The results may be affected by a small group of people, either involuntarily through programming errors, or with malicious intent. The inspections and audits of the system presently only apply to parts of the system, and even in these cases, citizens must trust specialists as major parts of the system software are considered to be trade secrets.

In addition, the audit of the system found that it may be possible to find out how an individual has voted, if an attacker would get access to the electronic ballot box and certain encryption keys, both of which are planned to be archived for several years.

Electronic Frontier Finland's shadow report compares the Finnish e-voting system with the Council of Europe recommendations for e-voting, and argues that the fully electronic voting system, which will be used in the Finnish e-voting pilot, does not meet these recommendations.

Download the Effi e-voting report here."

Thanks to Louise Ferguson via ORG for the link.