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Dutch Commission Deals Blow To Electronic Voting 210

Posted by kdawson from the return-to-paper dept.
hcdejong writes "The Dutch commission that has been investigating the electoral process presented its final report yesterday (Dutch). The conclusions and recommendations are devastating to the current Dutch practice of voting electronically, and to plans for voting via the internet. Paraphrasing from the report: The deputy minister for the interior Bijleveld said in an initial response (Dutch only) that she would revoke the certification of the current generation of electronic voting machines. The minister plans to present an official Cabinet position on the electoral process in two months. The next elections (for the European Parliament, 2009) may see a return to paper ballots." Read on for a translation of some of the key points from the report.

Paraphrasing from the report:
  • The current electronic voting machines do not comply with the basic requirements of an election (e.g. transparency, controllability, integrity).
  • The paper ballot still offers the best way to comply with these basic requirements.
  • The commission recommends using an electronic system to generate the paper ballot. The voter must be allowed to check the ballot before it is deposited in a locked box.
  • Votes can be counted electronically (by scanning the paper ballots), with the option of a manual recount.
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Dutch Commission Deals Blow To Electronic Voting More

Dutch Commission Deals Blow To Electronic Voting

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  • Why (Score:5, Insightful)

    by clarkkent09 ( 1104833 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @07:35AM (#20780723)
    I don't know why but this shit seems really hard to get right. Electronic stock trading, bank transactions, military systems etc - no problem. Electronic voting - disaster every time.
    • The stakes are far greateer and the players are far sleazier. In bank and trading scenarios there really is not much incentive as the folks controlling each link in the chain benefit by providing a good service over a long term. Politicians often have only one chance in a lifetime.
    • Most places only get once a year to test a system. Imagine if you only got to compile once a year. No matter how much bug and error checking you did, something would probably come up. We can't even get 25% of the population to vote in the US. Military, Bank, Stocks. Those happen daily at millions of transactions per minute. If something is wrong, it becomes apparent rather quickly.
      • The Ballot machines can easily be left in place all year round so you can test it every day.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by WiFiBro ( 784621 )
          The machines in question had a wossname, programmable chip (EPROM and EEPROM).

          The people of wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl (=wedonottrustvotingmachines.nl) showed how (http://www.wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/images/9/91/Es3b-en.pdf/ [wijvertrou...ersniet.nl]) you can reprogram the Nedap/Groenendaal ES3B voting toy in such a way that it is really hard to detect (physical checks were amateurous anyway).

          First by having a test whether the test is genuine. For instance, lasting at least 8 hours with a certain randomness in the v

    • Re:Why -- anonymity (Score:5, Insightful)

      by EJB ( 9167 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @08:02AM (#20780943) Homepage
      I can tell you why: anonymity
      In stock trading systems, bank transactions, etc., all parties are known in one way or another. Depending on the techniques used, if something goes wrong, the party that's wronged can prove who they are and that something didn't go as they directed.

      That doesn't work with electronic voting, since it is supposed to be anonymous. There are many reasons for that: full freedom in casting your vote (no employers, governments etc looking over you shoulder to check that you voted 'correctly'), and also not being able to prove what you voted for, to avoid vote-buying (you can pay for a vote but you'll never know what you paid for)
      It is very hard to build anonymity into an electronic voting system, and still have the same degree of tamper-proofness as a paper ballot.

      It should be noted that in the Netherlands, you have to color a circle of approx 1 cm diameter red. It is easier to see what the intention of the voter was than with hanging chads.

      Erwin
      • It's voter intimidation. Buying votes just isn't a very efficient use of money, and AFAIK in tUSA, it's not illegal.

        The real problem is when spouse/neighbor/employer/union_rep/government_official/pastor leans on you to vote a particular way, and then demands proof. Physical, financial, and spiritual intimidation is the real potential for abuse, and is illegal.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )
      Just because the stakes are very, very high. If you control the process of creating such voting machines and you have the ability to hide whatever is running on it you have the ability to control the voting process and the results, to put it in laymen's terms: you are "root" without a syslog or bash_history in voting who gets to be in a certain office. Any politician would give (or have given) their soul for control over the voting process, look at the latest elections.

      Something about power corrupts, absolu

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by OverflowingBitBucket ( 464177 )
      (As previously posted into the wrong thread by accident- long day)

      I don't know why but this shit seems really hard to get right. Electronic stock trading, bank transactions, military systems etc - no problem. Electronic voting - disaster every time.

      Because anonymity plus accountability is really difficult.

      In other systems you have nice trails that you can follow in the case of fraud.

      In voting you need to ensure voter anonymity and it makes it that much harder to verify results. Add in political corruption a
    • The answer is right there in the submission title:

      Dutch Commission Deals Blow To Electronic Voting

      Obviously, Electronic Voting is too busy doing rails off a hooker's backside to get it right, and we have the Dutch Commission to blame for that.
    • All the other systems are suppose to be in the open and traceable. That means that we can easily detect when things are wrong (and it happens far more than ppl realize). OTH, the vote is suppose to be secret and untraceable. More importantly, many of the companies who are putting these systems together absolutely do not want a paper trail. What is funny about that, is that it could double or triple their profits. But they do not want the responsibility of getting it right, just the profits. Welcome to the

    • It's not hard to get right, it's hard to get past vested interests which are intent on selling crap. I wrote an article for CounterPunch dealing with free software voting machines [counterpunch.org] and served on an appointed committee which recommended election hardware and software to the elected county board (the county board made the real decision, taking our input as just a recommendation). I was able to explain the fatal flaws in all the options before us and they're not hard to understand or see how to do a better jo

  • Ireland (Score:5, Informative)

    by zoney_ie ( 740061 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @07:41AM (#20780785)
    We nearly ended up using the same kit here in Ireland. There was an initial trial (6 constituencies used the machines in a general election) but afterwards there was a big controversy thrown up. The government set up a committee to investigate, mainly with the intention of keeping people happy, but the committee didn't just rubber-stamp the system. The committee alleged the machines were OK but the software wasn't (things like no secure process to approve updates, collating all the votes in MS Access databases, nonsense like that).

    Fortunately this was enough to scupper use of the machines in Ireland (as it was too much effort for the government to try and address even the very lenient concerns of the committee). Unfortunately, we are still storing the machines at a cost of millions of euro a year. Also the politician responsible for the mess got re-elected, cause his own constituency are happy that he's looking out for his area - national e-voting débacle is not in the minds of the locals.

    The recommendations of this Dutch committee would be good here in Ireland. There are often spoilt or disputed ballots because we use PR-STV (you number your preferred candidates rather than tick a box). Also counting takes a long time - up to a week including recounts sometimes till the last constituency is declared. So machine filled-out ballot papers and machine counted ballots would be great - especially if manual processing of the ballots is allowed in parallel, or for a certain no. of randomly chosen constituencies, or in any case of a challenge.

    But it's not likely the powers that be here would succeed in implementing it. Last time around they nearly ended up not being ready with enough simple partitions for the ordinary bog standard voting!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SigILL ( 6475 )

      We nearly ended up using the same kit here in Ireland. There was an initial trial (6 constituencies used the machines in a general election) but afterwards there was a big controversy thrown up. The government set up a committee to investigate, mainly with the intention of keeping people happy, but the committee didn't just rubber-stamp the system. The committee alleged the machines were OK but the software wasn't (things like no secure process to approve updates, collating all the votes in MS Access databa

    • ``We nearly ended up using the same kit here in Ireland.''

      In fact, the rejection of the machines in Ireland seems to have sparked the (grass-roots, kudos go to wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl [wijvertrou...ersniet.nl]) investigation in the Netherlands. Finally, they seemed to have stirred up enough commotion that the government took some measures (although, I must say, they fell short of what would have been desirable).

      It is amazing that voting systems like the ones we had in the Netherlands (and the Nedap machines we shipped to I
  • Online voting has always seemed to be a REALLY bad idea for me. Too easy to manipulate a vote...to easy to call someone and have them log on (which brings up the "no campaining near polling places" rules)...just too easy. Voting should take effort - if you go somewhere and spend some time, it means more and you are more apt to make sure of what you are doing.

    Agreed, at least in the US, there should be some provision for those who work long hours to go vote during the day (national holiday or something).
    • There's also a problem of not knowing if the person's vote is genuine. No matter how fancy the security system is, I can't tell if that "vote" coming from some remote system was pressured (an abusive spouse or house mate forcing someone to vote a particular way). In a voting booth, election judges can see who goes in and there's a reasonable means of giving voters their privacy. This is also a reason why you don't want a "receipt" after voting (not that you asked for this, it just comes up often in discu
  • Come on, everybody knows that the people in power won't change the voting systems. Seriously, given that the current politicians were elected via the current system and that their only hope is to keep rigging the election, how can you expect them to change the system?

    Oh, it's about the Dutch; that's ok then - those people care about their elections.

  • The electronic voting system proved to be easy to hack. The new system they will build will operate like this:
    - The new voting machines will look almost identical to the current electronic voting machines.
    - But instead of a message on the screen "You have voted. Thank you.", it prints the vote.
    - You take the print, check it, and deposit it in the voting box.

    This will be much harder to beat, but it remains to be seen how accurate the scanning system will be. By printing the vote, one can eliminate many

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Sique ( 173459 )
      But this is just paper ballot voting. The only difference is the complexity of the used pencil.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dmatos ( 232892 )
        Except that machine-printed ballots will not be subjected to such problems as hanging chads, partially filled circles, or multiple boxes checked.

        Additionally, since you are not limited to a single piece of paper on which to display all information, it should be possible to make the UI much more user-friendly. As I understand it, on US ballots, there are often multiple selections that need to be made at one time. With electronic voting, each electoral race (President, Police Chief, Congressman, etc) could

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Sique ( 173459 )
          That's right, but it doesn't need any of those much touted features the e-voting was supposed to have.

          It's just a machine helping your hand while you are making your choice, like a jig or someting.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Teun ( 17872 )

        But this is just paper ballot voting. The only difference is the complexity of the used pencil.
        Insightful.

        Yet the way I understand it is the electronic tallying will still be the prime result for the evening news.
        Later, possibly only after a complaint will the paper ballots be counted.
        I would find this satisfactory, even with a Closed Source machine there is a 100% check on the validity of the outcome.

  • Why the need for speed? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @08:11AM (#20781033) Journal

    In case you don't know Holland like Belgium is a coalition goverment, that means we do NOT have a single party who wins the election, unlike say Britain, France and the US.

    For a long time now it has taken ages to get this coalition together, it is usually done by the largest party (but not a majority) exploring what other parties are close to its ideas and are willing to work together so they can have a majority. The problem is that this ALWAYS takes a lot of time, sometimes months. So who cares about the speed of counting, what does 1 day spend counting mean if the goverment then needs 2-3 months to get together?

    We are so obssesed with instant results that perhaps we fail to realize that we add speed as a requirement when it isn't needed. "We need the election results as soon as possible". Why? "... just because". Drop the speed requirement and then see what kind of system you can come up with.

    On a side note, the belgium goverment at the moment is taking a long time to form a new goverment, whole months have gone by without a party in charge (in the dutch system the current goverment has to stop and this leaves an effective power vacuum during formation) and yet the world keeps on turning. What about an experiment, we put all politicians in jail for a year, and see what happens. My bet is the same as usual, nothing at all, but at a greatly reduced cost.

  • Well done!

    Computer voting sounds good but the reality is very different. No system should be trusted without a full, audited paper trail which allows recounts.

    PS: What exactly is wrong with mechanical ballot counting machines? Anybody who can't figure out how to punch a hole in a piece of paper shouldn't be allowed to vote anyway.

    • I've never used a mechanical system, but I can imagine several problems. The 'hanging chads' has been well publicised. Also, how well does a mechanical system scale? For national elections, you have to be able to mark one choice from several hundred. That's rather a large piece of paper to manipulate into the machine. The last time I used a paper ballot, the ballot was about A2-sized and was folded like a map. I suspect a printer has less chance of damaging the ballot than a hole punch would.

  • Estonian E-Voting System (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rehapapp ( 698500 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @08:19AM (#20781113) Journal
    If you want to know how proper Internet Voting System works, then read Estonian E-Voting System - General Description [www.vvk.ee]
    The only prerequisite for a country to use the system is that it has to deploy PKI [www.id.ee] at first...

  • Credit to "We Don't Trust Voting Computers" (Score:5, Informative)

    by AlXtreme ( 223728 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @10:42AM (#20782965) Homepage Journal
    This whole issue wouldn't have existed without thorough research and lots of persistence of the group at "We Don't Trust Voting Computers" [wijvertrou...ersniet.nl]. These men and women have dived into the voting computers used for decades in the Netherlands, found numerous serious flaws and made them public. They forced our government to install this commission, which has lead to the best possible outcome: no more electronic voting.

    Thanks guys, you rock.

  • A solution without a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dan the person ( 93490 ) on Friday September 28, 2007 @11:21AM (#20783599) Homepage Journal
    Why do we need electronic voting?

    In new zealand we use paper ballots, you tick the box you want with a marker pen. Polls close in the early evening, and the result of the election is usually known later that night.

    The paper ballets are anonymous, transparent, reliable, and cheap.

    Remind me, what problem do electronic voting machines solve?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbn-o ( 555068 )

      The only role for computers to play in voting is helping to prepare a paper ballot. And even that role should be optional, according to the voter's desire. In that role there are genuine advantages no voter should have to do without. Computers can help the illiterate and blind vote in privacy (meaning that they don't have to bring a buddy into the booth with them, thus divulging their vote).

      No computers are needed to count ballots at any stage of the election process. All counting can be (and is, in s

  • "Dutch Commission Deals Blow To Electronic Voting"

    I know the Netherlands is a open, permissive country but the government dealing cocaine is just a little too much. No, I did not RTFA.

  • One thing that the Dutch have got right though, is ensuring that people are well-informed as to their voting options, to help them select the right party to vote for:

    http://stomwijzer.nl/ [stomwijzer.nl]

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