Effi's e-voting 'shadow report'

(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar)

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 19 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, Effi argues 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 apply only 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 gets 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.

Incompatibility of the Finnish e-voting system with the Council of Europe
e-voting recommendations (1.08.2008)
http://www.effi.org/system/files?file=FinnishEVotingCoEComparison_Effi_20080801.pdf

EDRi-gram: Finnish e-voting system must not stay a trade secret (13.02.2008)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number6.3/finland-e-voting

(contribution by EDRi-member Electronic Frontier Finland )