Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure

palata

The 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

diego_moita

Meanwhile 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.

zoobab

eVoting cannot be understood and audited by normal citizens, not even by nerdy ones. It's just good for the trash.

jackweirdy

It’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

I 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)

eunos

That's a very exact number if you know what I mean

ericmay

Stories 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.

fabiofzero

Brazil has digital voting since 1996 and it works pretty much flawlessly. I'm sure Switzerland will figure it out someday.

MengerSponge

> 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.

clcaev

Don’t forget about https://verifiedvoting.org/ and its decades-long advocacy for scanned paper ballots.

pilingual

https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2026/01/16/internet-voting-i...

eqvinox

sigh 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

Why is everyone so obsessed with automating voting? It seems to me to be a 'solution' to a non-existent problem.

jonas21

I wish the article had more technical details. Obviously, 2048 being a power of 2 stands out as being possibly related.

nobrains

It 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?

august-

honest 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

While 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.

luplex

I 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.

steve1977

Everyone ever involved with IT in Swiss governments (both on a cantonal and on the federal level) will not be surprised.

ChoGGi

Paper has a trail, e-voting makes it's own trail. No thanks.