Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after USB keys fail to decrypt them
- Reference: 1773232299
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/03/11/swiss_evote_usb_snafu/
- Source link:
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.
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"Three USB sticks were used, all with the correct code, but none of them worked," spokesperson Marco Greiner [2]told the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation's Swissinfo service.
[3]
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The canton has since commissioned an external analysis of the incident, adding that it [5]deeply regrets the violation of affected voters' political rights.
The votes made up less than 4 percent of those cast in Basel-Stadt and would not have changed any results, but the canton is delaying confirmation of voting figures until March 21 and suspending its e-voting pilot until the end of December, while its public prosecutor's office has started criminal proceedings.
[6]You can't spell 'electronics' without 'elect': The time for online democracy has come
[7]Ireland scraps e-voting in favour of 'stupid old pencils'
[8]E-voting and the UK election: Pick a lizard, any lizard
[9]Open Rights Group recounts e-voting horror story
The country's Federal Chancellery said e-voting in three other cantons – Thurgau, Graubünden, and St Gallen – along with the nationally used Swiss Post e-voting system, had not been affected.
Switzerland is running small-scale e-voting pilots in four of its 26 cantons with the aim of helping citizens living abroad to vote, given the time it takes to receive and send postal votes. A previous attempt to set up [10]e-voting was scrapped in 2019 after researchers found security flaws in software source code.
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Two of Sunday's referendum questions focused on the availability of cash. Nearly three-quarters of voters approved a government proposal to enshrine the mandate of the Swiss National Bank to [12]supply physical cash and stick with the Swiss franc in the country's constitution, while a similar proposal backed by campaigners was narrowly rejected.
This is despite Switzerland having one of the lowest levels of cash use in Europe with just 30 percent of physical transactions in 2024 involving notes or coins. ®
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[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2abGfttAaW9crnAcNOn-3OAAAAAU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-abroad/e-voting-debacle-in-basel-embarrassing-glitch-or-serious-problem/91064032
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44abGfttAaW9crnAcNOn-3OAAAAAU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33abGfttAaW9crnAcNOn-3OAAAAAU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.bs.ch/medienmitteilungen/2026-e-voting-basel-stadt-gibt-analyse-zu-den-umstaenden-und-ursachen-des-vorfalls-bei-der-abstimmung-vom-8-maerz-2026-auftrag
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/02/electronic_voting/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2009/04/23/ireland_evoting/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2015/04/29/general_election_2015_evoting_lizards/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2007/06/20/evoting_horror_story/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2019/03/12/swiss_evoting_system_vulnerability/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/publicsector&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44abGfttAaW9crnAcNOn-3OAAAAAU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-democracy/cash-in-the-constitution-a-swiss-decision-on-an-international-issue/91061001
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Was capita involved?
Seems like their Modus Operandi
Don't do e-voting. Not for anything important. The research has been done and the results are in. Matt Blaze (who co-founded the voting vilage at DefCon) has written extensively on election integrity.
Use paper ballots. By all means use an electronic counting system (e.g. a scannable ballot that is scanned prior to posting in the ballot box) - that allows you to get an instant provisional result when the polls close and perform a manual count if the electronic system fails, the result is challenged, or to verify a close result.
But the actual votes? There's no substitute for a mark on a bit of paper.
Voting schemes
My own analysis of cryptographic voting schemes using asymmetric cryptography was that all it did in reality was allow whoever reported the counting of the votes to cheat with impunity. There would be a computer terminal which would display the results and that was that. No ability to check the results, and even if the source code was published, no way to ensure that it had actually been used for the election. There must be a robust and independent way to perform a re-count of ballots to ensure that 'the choice of the people' is honestly revealed for democracy to work.
I looked at several schemes proposed by some highly respected people in the cryptographic community (no names, no pack drill) a few decades ago, and they were all crap. None of them allowed the voter to decrypt their ballot to check that it agreed with what they voted for. And there was no chance for an independent recount either. I have not looked at the trial Swiss system, but beware of any scheme where the voters cannot tell who or what they have voted for.
Re: Voting schemes
Brave of you to assume that voters know who or what they have voted for under normal circumstances,
Re: Voting schemes
Maybe look more recently than a few decades ago? I have for one or two decades been hearing talks about voting schemes that allow voters to check not just their vote but the correctness of the whole count. For example, https://warwick.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/university_of_warwicks_secure_e-voting_software_used_in_first_real-world_election_1/ is press release blurb about something I probably saw about 10 years ago. I recall another scheme from Australia a while ago too, with much the same list of properties.
Hanging chad
>"There's no substitute for a mark on a bit of paper."
Greetings from George W. Bush in November 2000!
Digital technology is too efficient for elections
We love technology because it is efficient. That's usually a good thing, but in elections, that's a problem.
Tech efficiency makes it too easy to botch large numbers of votes or commit voter fraud on a mass scale.
Elections are one thing we want to be deliberately inefficient. Paper ballots are hard to fraudulently manufacture on a mass scale. Paper ballots are hard to lose in large quantities.
It should take a lot of work to oversee voting and to count ballots. There should be a lot of election workers and observers all keeping an eye on each other. Deliberate slowness and the need for many hands is a feature, not a bug.
Re: Digital technology is too efficient for elections
To err is human, to really screw things up takes a computer.
Should we raise one or two digits to Digital Cash?
"This is despite Switzerland having one of the lowest levels of cash use in Europe with just 30 percent of physical transactions in 2024 involving notes or coins"
30% seems a large enough number to me to rule out abandoning physical cash.
If any country does abandon cash; what's the plan for when its power grid is knocked out for a prolonged period by a hostile state or actor, or war?
People are going to starve to death and that's just fine?
Re: Should we raise one or two digits to Digital Cash?
Don't be silly, there's plenty of eating on the rich, and the security systems on gated compounds rely on that same electricity.
Re: 30% seems a large enough number to me to rule out abandoning physical cash.
Yeah, even if 99% of people didn't use cash 99% of the time, I expect the majority of them would want to be able to use cash as a fallback when (not if) some tech in the payment chain fails. As it does from time to time even under benign conditions.
Re: Should we raise one or two digits to Digital Cash?
It still surprises me how much money some of the older generations of Swiss use. It's not uncommon to see 1000CHF notes being used in shops.
I use more Euros than CHFs in cash as a lot of places in Germany are still in the dark ages and refuse to take card.
Time and again
Lost count of the number of times I've had to explain to users that flash drives are not suitable for storage of irreplaceable data, they're only good for copying data.
Why anyone thought it was a good idea to carry the only copy of voting data around is a mystery
Re: Time and again
It's not the voting data on the USB stick, it's the encryption key. Which, in this case, is effectively the same thing as one is useless without the other.
2048 = 2^11.
That seems like a convenient number.