Swiss E-Voting Pilot Can't Count 2,048 Ballots After USB Keys Fail To Decrypt Them (theregister.com)
- Reference: 0180954974
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/03/11/1953224/swiss-e-voting-pilot-cant-count-2048-ballots-after-usb-keys-fail-to-decrypt-them
- Source link: https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/11/swiss_evote_usb_snafu/
> 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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> 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. The country's Federal Chancellery said e-voting in three other cantons -- Thurgau, Graubunden, and St Gallen -- along with the nationally used Swiss Post e-voting system, had not been affected.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/11/swiss_evote_usb_snafu/
[2] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-abroad/e-voting-debacle-in-basel-embarrassing-glitch-or-serious-problem/91064032
[3] 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
why are vote being ENCRYPTED ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Signed? Sure, that makes perfect sense. But encrypted ? Why do you even want to do that? Unless the ballot isn't anonymous and you can see who voted for which candidates, but I certainly hope you're not trying to do that?
Re: (Score:2)
it's a good point, but, arguably the result would be the same. If you can't verify the signature even for technical reasons, then you can't really use the votes.
Although certainly using a few separate signature keys and algorithms on the same doc could provide redundancy in case one of the key pairs is lost / damaged etc.
But encrypting data at rest (basically all storage) is a checkbox requirement in pretty much all security frameworks even if it's not clear exactly what that's protecting against, how t
What is the Security Architecture? (Score:3)
I am not familiar with it, and I assume that so are you. So, fantasies...
There might be nonces or other tokens attached to a vote that must remain secret (proof of voting only once, etc.). Another use of encryption is avoiding claims along the lines "The results published by authorities are false! Here is the true copy which cannot be validated because dem computors are broken! But everyone knows that the copy is REALLY TRUE!" With the present system, if dem computors are broken, there cannot be any a
Re:why are vote being ENCRYPTED ? (Score:4, Insightful)
> Signed? Sure, that makes perfect sense. But encrypted ? Why do you even want to do that? Unless the ballot isn't anonymous and you can see who voted for which candidates, but I certainly hope you're not trying to do that?
You need to do that to preserve confidentiality of the vote. Nobody except the voter should know how they personally voted. Furthermore, nobody should know how the votes are being cast until tallying officially begins.
What they do is they authenticate the user to make sure they are eligible to vote, but the ballot is submitted end-to-end encrypted from the voter's device. The system that receives the ballot knows the user is eligible to vote, receives the user's ballot, but cannot read the ballot's content.
The ballot can only be decrypted by the tallying authority and the decryption is performed only after the tallying can officially begin. This means nobody knows how a particular voter voted and nobody knows how the vote is going in advance.
Re: (Score:2)
> This means nobody knows how a particular voter voted
My point was that it should NEVER be possible for ANYONE to determine how an individual voted. I don't care if you promise to encrypt it. That information shouldn't be stored anywhere , in any form, encrypted or otherwise.
So if THAT'S their reason for encrypting it, people need to take a step back and think about the reason .
Re: (Score:3)
> My point was that it should NEVER be possible for ANYONE to determine how an individual voted. I don't care if you promise to encrypt it. That information shouldn't be stored anywhere , in any form, encrypted or otherwise.
> So if THAT'S their reason for encrypting it, people need to take a step back and think about the reason .
What is encrypted is the ballot, so e.g. "yes" or "no" if that are the available choices. The ballot does not contain any identifiable information.
By decrypting the ballot they would be able to know whether it contains "yes" or "no", but they would still be unable to know who cast that particular yes/no.
Re: (Score:2)
At a very low point of activity you can always determine it, though. If you can swap out USB keys before and after a single person votes, then the swapped key contains only one vote. When you decrypt it you'll know how that one person voted.
Re: (Score:2)
> At a very low point of activity you can always determine it, though. If you can swap out USB keys before and after a single person votes, then the swapped key contains only one vote. When you decrypt it you'll know how that one person voted.
Sure, but technically you can do with a physical box too... In e-voting they employ mechanisms to avoid that kind of tracking before tallying, e.g. [1]mixnets. [swisspost-digital.ch]
> The mix network is the basis for the complete verifiability of Swiss Post’s e-voting system. It consists of mixers that mix and re-encrypt the votes after the electronic ballot box has been closed on the Election/Voting Sunday. The mix network prevents the individual and the vote they have cast from being linked to each other and ensures that voting secrecy is protected. Additionally, the mix network provides evidence that no votes were changed, deleted or added. The algorithms used in the mix network are available in the published open-source library of cryptographic primitives. Swiss Post has completely rewritten these algorithms. Swiss Post’s e-voting system is based on the Bayer-Groth mix network.
[1] https://swisspost-digital.ch/en/evoting-community/help-and-contact/faq
So no one tested it? (Score:2)
Sounds like not a single part of the system worked.
Er.. that's a very suspicious number (Score:3)
That exact number of failures is very suspicious and makes me wonder if something else is going on
Re: (Score:2)
2^11 is certainly a "convenient" number.
makes me wonder if the voting sample was much larger, and some weird bug trashed the first 2^11 votes somehow. Maybe the first block of a file got corrupted or something like that?
E-voting in Geneva (Score:5, Insightful)
The Canton of Geneva used to have e-voting for citizens abroad. I don't know how secure it was, but it was really convenient.
Voting is handled by the cantons, and I don't think all of the cantons offered electronic voting. This meant that citizens from Geneva who lived abroad could vote electronically but citizens of Ticino (for example) who lived abroad could not.
Geneva scrapped it a few years ago. I don't think anyone else has it anymore, outside of this pilot, but I could be wrong.
For those who don't know, Switzerland votes several times per year in nation-wide referendums, in addition to the normal elections for political offices. It's interesting to see the kinds of questions that are put to everyday citizens. The questions often come from everyday citizens and sometimes try to make radical changes to things.
The cantons send mail-in ballots to citizens abroad. Between the transit abroad and then back to Switzerland, I wonder how many overseas ballots actually make it back in time.
Re: (Score:2)
> Between the transit abroad and then back to Switzerland, I wonder how many overseas ballots actually make it back in time.
It's estimated that [1]about 1/4 of the voters abroad have issues [swissinfo.ch]. It's one of the main reasons e-voting is being pushed.
[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/why-can-t-voting-papers-be-sent-to-the-swiss-abroad-earlier/46593188
USB failed, or decrypt failed? (Score:2)
The article doesn't make it clear if the drives containing the key failed (all of them), or if the decryption failed. Assuming the drives agree on the content of the encryption key, it sounds more likely that the *en*cryption key was incorrectly specified, or the vote data was corrupted such that it cannot be decrypted. Or perhaps someone swapped the data during transportation and this is a feature-not-bug.
Perhaps the encryption step itself failed. (Score:2)
Exactly 2048 ballots itself seems odd to get to an exact number that is very significant in the computing world.
2048... interesting number in computing.. (Score:1)
2048... interesting number in computing.. 2k
Test first. Print out the key. (Score:2)
As QR code on paper. Twice.
Hope they learn their lesson.
Buy cheap shit... (Score:3)
Buy cheap shit, get cheap shit.
If you need encryption keys and to have them portable and secure?
Two options: 1) yubikey. Use its built in features. or 2) Industrial storage. The latter uses SLC or MLC NAND Flash with nicer wear leveling provisions instead of shit-tier USB drives which may not have any wear leveling algorithm at all (let alone extra "hidden" space to help that algorithm out). QLC in the cheap USB shit is rated around 100 write cycles per cell. This can degrade exceedingly fast. I've been able to kill USB drives from major brands like Samsung and Sandisk in less than 1 full drive write cycle because it cycled a few of the early cells to quickly and killed them. Do you know how great storage works when you dont have a partition table or file system header anymore !?
Re:Buy cheap shit... (Score:4, Informative)
have them portable and secure?
Two options: 1) yubikey.
Yubikey I would have once considered secure, but they closed the source with the introduction of the YK4 (exactly commensurate with the Snowden Revelations - Imagine that), and there's no reason I should trust them. The onus is on them to prove their product is "secure" and they're not able or willing to do so.
Re: (Score:2)
Honest question, as I haven't spent much time with the topic: what's the primary security concern for the device? Maybe at-rest encryption and exfiltration resistance? AFAICT all the auth methods it makes available are open standards, and I sort of just default to the standard rule that exfil of the private keys is a matter of time once physical access to the device is gained.
Re: (Score:2)
If they're using industry-standard methods there should be no problem opening their code (as it used to be).
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, but my question is methods for... what?
Re: (Score:2)
Master keys, mistakes, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
If you really want reliability, no flash. Proper write once, burn it into the chip ROM. You could get someone to design you a ROM key stick for not much money and you could release the specs as open hardware, which would fit will with the Swiss system's open source ethos.
Yubikey is at least EEPROM, but that does leave the possibility that it gets erased accidentally by static or on purpose and reused by idiots.
I couldn't find out what they meant by "USB key" anyway. Yubikeys are USB keys.