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Swiss e-vote snafu leaves 2,048 ballots unreadable (www.theregister.com)

submitted 19 hours ago by Powderhorn@beehaw.org to c/news@beehaw.org

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A Swiss canton has suspended its pilot of electronic voting after failing to count 2,048 votes cast in national referendums held on March 8.

Basel-Stadt announced the problem with its e-voting pilot, open to about 10,300 locals living abroad and 30 people with disabilities, last Friday afternoon. It encouraged participants to deliver a paper vote to the town hall or use a polling station but admitted this would not be possible for many.

By the close of polling on Sunday, its e-voting system had collected 2,048 votes, but Basel-Stadt officials were not able to decrypt them with the hardware provided, despite the involvement of IT experts.

"Three USB sticks were used, all with the correct code, but none of them worked," spokesperson Marco Greiner told the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation's Swissinfo service.

The canton has since commissioned an external analysis of the incident, adding that it deeply regrets the violation of affected voters' political rights.

Huh. A functioning government apologizing for disenfranchisement.

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[–] Malgas@beehaw.org 1 points 25 minutes ago

2048 is a suspiciously round number (it's 2^11^) to the point that I came into the article expecting to read about an error affecting some subset of the records. But no, that's the exact number of votes cast using the system, out of a larger and less round pool of potential voters.

So apparently it's a coincidence, but it's making my brain itch.

[–] along_the_road@beehaw.org 1 points 11 hours ago

Electronic voting sucks. No way to audit anything.