19 ms·
Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure
- palata 8mo agoThe 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_experiment
- jjgreen 8mo agoHad to truncate the title since too long for HN (often the case for the Register)
- palata 8mo agoAnd 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 8mo agoYou cut out something that changed the message entirely
- jjgreen 8mo agoI thought the edit window was 15 minutes, but it seems it is an hour, so edited to restore the "pilot"
- beautiful_apple 8mo agoSwitzerland 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.
- diego_moita 8mo agoMeanwhile 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.
- palata 8mo agoAnd they probably started with small-scale pilots, too.
- diego_moita 8mo agoYes, 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 8mo agoActually 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.
- diego_moita 8mo agoCan'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.
- zoobab 8mo agoeVoting cannot be understood and audited by normal citizens, not even by nerdy ones. It's just good for the trash.
- palata 8mo agoAlso e-voting can be hacked (I guess they vote from their computer/smartphone, which can be hacked from the other side of the world). The last place you want to care about phishing, IMO, is voting. Good luck hacking in-person voting or even "physical" mail voting from the other side of the world.
- phoronixrly 8mo agoRegular ballot voting can also be hacked and on a scale. Making ballots invalid while counting them, or modifying them in some form or other, intentionally writing wrong values in the counting protocols... And of course controlled vote or paid vote... E-voting can and has also led to exposing voting fraud -- see Venezuella.
- another-dave 8mo agobut it's done in public where anyone observing the count can see that the people counting don't have any pencils etc in their hand
- tribaal 8mo agoExactly - it's done in public, and not centrally. Any citizen can go and check how it's done in their own Geminde.
- palata 8mo agoYeah but it cannot be hacked from the other side of the world. I think it's a different kind of threat. If an attacker from somewhere else in the world want to tamper with their votes, they have to get Swiss people to modify the ballots, or get their agent to learn Swiss-German, good luck with that :D.
- jackweirdy 8mo agoIt’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
- ritzaco 8mo agoI don't care how much maths and encryption you use, you can't get out of the fact that things can be anonymous (no one can know how you voted) or verifiable (people can prove that you only voted once) but not both. - Switzerland usually gets around this by knowing where everyone lives and mailing them a piece of paper 'something you have' - South Africa gets around this by putting ink on your fingernail I've read quite a bit about the e-voting systems in Switzerland and USA and I just don't see how they thread the needle. At some point, you have to give someone access to a database and they can change that database. Until we all have government-issued public keys or something, there isn't a technical solution to this? (Genuinely curious if I'm wrong here)
- phoronixrly 8mo ago> At some point, you have to give someone access to a database and they can change that database. It's the only problem in existence that can be solved by the blockchain...
- caminanteblanco 8mo agoBut generally sacrifices that anonymous axis via a reproduceable public ledger
- phoronixrly 8mo agoUnless pseudonymized...
- beautiful_apple 8mo agoIronically most production e-voting systems do not use blockchains. That's because there isn't need for decentralization, just verifiability of a correct result and protecting voting secrecy.
- kanapala 8mo agoThere's a goverment issued public & private key right here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card
- eunos 8mo agoThat's a very exact number if you know what I mean
- marcosdumay 8mo agoYou mean round, not exact. Looks like some block-size thing.
- ericmay 8mo agoStories like this probably scare some people off from electronic voting but I don't think this is that big of a deal. When we finish voting operations in my area we load the ballots up on someone's personal vehicle and they take them down, securely, to where they need to go. That vehicle could get blown up and those ballots could be gone, though I think we could still get a record of the results. That being said for the United States, I am in favor of in-person voting requiring proof of citizenship, and making "voting day" a paid national holiday. Not so much for technical or efficiency reasons but for social reasons. I'd argue it should be mandatory but I don't think we should force people to do anything we don't have to force them to do, and I'm not sure we want disinterested people voting anyway. Exercising democracy, requiring people to put in a minimal amount of thought and effort goes a long way. It should be a celebratory day with cookies and apple pie and free beer for all. Not some cold, AI-riddled, stay in your house and never meet your neighbors, clicking a few buttons to accept the Terms of Democracy process. I know there's a lot of discussion points around "efficiency" or "cost" or "accessibility" or how difficult it supposedly is to have an ID (which is weird when you look at how other countries run elections) and there are certainly things to discuss there, but by and large I think the continued digitalization and alienation of Americans is a much worse problem that can be addressed with more in-person activities and participation in society. We're losing too many touchpoints with reality.
- phailhaus 8mo agoVoter registration already requires proof of citizenship. What is the point of requiring that high bar of proof on the day of voting as well?
- nomorewords 8mo agoWhy have voter registration?
- ericmay 8mo agoIn the United States at least, voter registration will include your place of residence which will place you in a specific precinct. In other words: "I am so and so, and I live here. Votes that affect this area include me, and I get a say." When voters are voting for things, for example a tax levy to fund a new school, or for who will be their state or federal congressional representatives, it's important that the voters in that school district or in that congressional district are the ones voting for their representatives or for the bills or initiatives that affect them. This isn't quite as important for national elections, gubernatorial races, or for the senate at the federal level, but it's obviously incredibly important the more local you get. Without voter registration, that model breaks down. Even mundane things like how much staff and equipment should be at a polling location is not easy to figure out when you don't know how many voters you'll have. If you haven't worked as a poll worker it's really enlightening to learn about how the process works and a great way to meet your neighbors.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- fabiofzero 8mo agoBrazil has digital voting since 1996 and it works pretty much flawlessly. I'm sure Switzerland will figure it out someday.
- MengerSponge 8mo ago> Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future! > Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
- anonymars 8mo agoIndeed -- https://m.xkcd.com/2030/ https://m.xkcd.com/2030/
- clcaev 8mo agoDon’t forget about https://verifiedvoting.org/ https://verifiedvoting.org/ and its decades-long advocacy for scanned paper ballots.
- pilingual 8mo agohttps://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/01/16/internet-voting-is-insecure-and-should-not-be-used-in-public-elections/ https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/01/16/internet-voting-i...
- eqvinox 8mo agosigh This is why you do parallel paper/electronic voting. Fill it out electronically, it prints a receipt (maybe including a QR code), you mail the receipt (along with the 'classic' absentee voting stuff, i.e. double envelope, proof of eligibility to vote in the outer envelope.) Oh and as a side effect it can be audited very nicely.
- ninalanyon 8mo agoIf you are doing paper voting why bother with voting machines at all? What's the benefit?
- eqvinox 8mo agoImmediate results without miscounts and at far lower cost. Given some confidence into the system, you'd only audit the paper ballots stochastically for a randomly chosen, say, 5% of election districts each time. [Whether that's worth it, I'll not make a statement on.]
- ninalanyon 8mo agoThe UK gets it done within 24 hours with very few miscounts and even fewer miscounts that matter. And is there good data on the relative costs?
- eqvinox 8mo agoSorry, I don't have further data on this. It's going to be a subjective judgement either way.
- ninalanyon 8mo agoWhy is everyone so obsessed with automating voting? It seems to me to be a 'solution' to a non-existent problem.
- throwaway5752 8mo ago[flagged]
- frumplestlatz 8mo agoI'm a Republican in the United States. The only credential I want is proof of identity, just like most other countries, including our neighbors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_identification_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_identification_laws
- throwaway5752 8mo agoThat's not really enough, is it? I didn't say we shouldn't have proof of identity. First, do we not have proof of identity? How often should we have proof of idenity? How many cases of fraud are there per year? How large is the problem? Second, who should issue a different proof of identity? How much should it cost? Should the requirements be left to states or the federal government? Third, who would administer this system. Would it be public or private, or left to states? What criminal and civil law should exist for misusing this law for witholding the right to vote on this basis? Would you trust a non-Republican leadership if DHS still was the agency verifying identity documents and storing soft-copies of them? What you want isn't unreasonable, but you leave out so many details that your reasonable statement can be misused for ill intent and denying people their right to vote. A fair follow up question for me to you might be "how do you feel about the additional requirements for married women to get reissued vital documents when they have changed their birth name to their husband's last name in the SAVE act?" When concerns like these aren't addressed in massive changes to voting laws, it makes lots of people uncomfortable that the changes aren't made in good faith.
- sonofhans 8mo agoControl. If you can centralize all voting results in a single place you can control distribution of them. If you are the only entity able to read the results then everyone else has to take your word for it. Paper ballots with physical marks are easy to track and recount. Digital paper trails are ephemeral. Whom does this benefit? The people counting the ballots.
- jonas21 8mo agoI wish the article had more technical details. Obviously, 2048 being a power of 2 stands out as being possibly related.
- nobrains 8mo agoIt was a pilot. Isn't this (kinda) good news that this "bug" was caught and now the next iteration will be closer to the intended behavior?
- mulmen 8mo agoI propose voting by shooting ballots. It seems dangerous at first but every negligent discharge strengthens democracy.
- august- 8mo agohonest question - has any country actually deployed e-voting at scale without running into serious issues? it feels like every pilot i read about hits a wall at some point
- t0mas88 8mo agoWhile this sounds like it allowed remote voting, it's interesting that some places (e.g. The Netherlands) went back to 100% paper instead of voting machines. That causes counting to take quite some time, with estimates/interim counts in between. I don't understand why voting machines can't just print your vote on a piece of paper behind a plastic window for you to see while also recoding the vote in a database. That is 100% anonymous and can't be cheated. The database is the instant answer at election closing time, and then you can take some days to count the papers as confirmation that nothing weird happened. No way to hack that. If you print something different on the paper the voter will see it. If you try to hack it by printing more papers than actual votes, the paper count won't match the amount of voting passes that you collected/verified when letting people into the polling station. It may even be safer than the current paper approach, because if the paper vote counters try to cheat their counts won't match the database triggering an investigation as well.
- macintux 8mo agoVoting machines here (Indiana) will print a sheet with your choices, which you can review before feeding it to a counting machine. That way you have a paper trail for recounts, and a sanity check before the vote is cast.
- realo 8mo agoWe have 100% paper voting in Canada. We vote during the day... polls close in the evening... A few hours later we have the results. Hand counted, for the entire country. What is the difference?
- mattashii 8mo agoPossibly, ballot sheet size? The national elections in NLD have a single ballot in the whole country, with 10+ parties who each get a column of their candidates on the ballot, and with one box for each of the candidates. In these elections for the 150 seats of parliament, often there are 200+ candidates listed total. As a result, the ballot sheets need to be quite large and so are quite far into the 'unwieldy' part of the handling spectrum. This size issue also complicates verification and counting, because you have to verify that of all checkboxes, exactly one is filled in, and sorting/counting needs to do this for practically every ballot. There has been some experimenting with changing the ballot to a 'party' and 'list number' ballot, where you fill in the party of your chosen candidate together with their number on the party list, but AFAIK that has not (yet?) been approved for wider use.
- luplex 8mo agoI don't understand the need for e-voting. Germany's entirely paper-based system works fine! After voting closes, volunteers count the votes for a few hours and we get a result.
- bdamm 8mo agoCanada also uses hand counted paper ballots and it works great. There's no need to make large-scale voting electronic, and I'd never trust it without major social institutions in place that can provide the kind of oversight we have with good old paper ballots.
- hootz 8mo agoBrazil uses fully electronic voting and it works great.
- rickpm 8mo agoNo, it doesn't. Every single election bunch of weird stuff happening regardless of the winner. Paper ballots are much better.
- diego_moita 8mo ago> bunch of weird stuff happening Every election has "bunch of weird stuff happening" because every election has losers that don't like to lose, either with paper or e-vote. To use a soccer analogy, it is like the losing team that blames the referee. The ones complaining about "bunch of weird stuff happening" are just playing Trump.
- matheusmoreira 8mo agoHard not to "blame the referee" when the supreme judge-kings in charge of the electronic voting system are openly partisan to say the least. In fact, the issue of fair elections in Brazil has become background noise because of these so called "referees". They have usurped so much power elections are just theater at this point. It doesn't matter who wins because in the end it's the judge-kings who rule the country. There's no point in even discussing the matter until their fall.
- steve1977 8mo agoEveryone ever involved with IT in Swiss governments (both on a cantonal and on the federal level) will not be surprised.
- ChoGGi 8mo agoPaper has a trail, e-voting makes it's own trail. No thanks.
- everfrustrated 8mo agoThe biggest advantage physical voting has it is follows human-scaling laws. Which often is a problem (inefficient) but for voting this is a massive benefit for one particular reason - due to lack of automation any fraud doesn't also benefit from the same automation so has to be large scale and widely distributed for it to be impactful (the fraud has to be distributed to the humans involved). Which isn't to say that it can't happen (and does!) but requires a lot more effort and in the physical world there always a lot more fingerprints left, cameras looking, informants, etc.
- lesuorac 8mo agoIsn't the advantageous fraud easy to do? Sheriff monitors the ballot box (ex. Jimmy Carter's opponent). Only allow loyalists to count the result (and then report w/e you want; ex. Russia).
- Muromec 8mo agoIt's not fraud is difficult to do, it's difficult to do so without people noticing. The problem of r-country is not that fraud is not discovered, they problem is they are not capable to course-correct (in general, but in regards to having elections specifically)
- danpalmer 8mo agoIt's also very difficult to scale. For one voting site you might need a few people to force it, plus a few more counting the votes. For thousands of sites you need many thousands of people. Versus e-voting where may conceivably manage to swing the vote with a handful of people.
- thangalin 8mo agoHow Cosmic Ray Influenced an Election: https://scotopia.in/journal/journalbkend/paper_list/v-4-i-1(1).pdf https://scotopia.in/journal/journalbkend/paper_list/v-4-i-1(... Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs My Līberum Cōnsilium (see references on page 55): https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/delibero/raw/HEAD/docs/manual/manual.pdf https://repo.autonoma.ca/repo/delibero/raw/HEAD/docs/manual/...
- nemo44x 8mo agoPaper ballots work just fine. Why are we using tools for scale (computers) when voting is an incredibly small and finite domain. Just total waste of tax dollars and over engineered solution to a simple problem.
- hocuspocus 8mo agoVoting is definitely not a small domain in a direct democracy, and many Swiss citizens abroad don't receive paper ballots early enough to mail them back in time.
- nemo44x 8mo agoProvisional ballots work fine. Statistical inference works too.
- Vvector 8mo agoPaper ballots are a must. Vote on a touchscreen, then have the terminal print out a voter-verifiable paper ballot that can also be machine counted. Make the ballot printout layout a standard format. Then machines from multiple vendors can verify the counts on a subset of the ballots. And as a last resort, the ballots can be hand counted as well.
- stubish 8mo agoThis is an eVoting system - not at a ballot box. There is no printer. And even if there was, a similar problem can occur if you lose the keys. And you need keys because the printout cannot be voter verifiable, or you enable the various forms of vote fraud that anonymous ballot boxes were introduced to stop.
- PunchyHamster 8mo ago...so they found voting fraud, good job
- qq66 8mo ago> By the close of polling on Sunday, its e-voting system had collected 2,048 votes I have a hard time believing that it collected exactly 2,048 votes by coincidence
- userbinator 8mo agoHopefully everyone on this site notices the significance of that number.
- justsid 8mo agoI definitely assumed they were encrypted separately in 2048 vote chunks and that one such chunk failed to decrypt.
- angrydev 8mo ago2kb ram should be enough for anybody
- DoctorOetker 8mo agoThe article is very light on the encryption scheme and software used. For HN I would have expected a more detailed discussion of what could have gone wrong (it seems like a bug in some software package since we have this power of 2 ^ 11 being 2048
- 2143 8mo agoThere’s a Phrack article that’s relevant. Internet Voting https://phrack.org/issues/69/11 https://phrack.org/issues/69/11
- greatgib 8mo agoThe votes made up less than 4 percent of those cast in Basel-Stadt and would not have changed any results I like the concept of "your vote was useless anyway".