Electronic voting in Belgium

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Electronic voting in Belgium started in 1991 when two locations were chosen to experiment on different electronic voting systems during the 24 November 1991 general elections. The law of 16 July 1991 to permit this experiment was passed by an absolute majority with no opposition at all. One of the systems tested was based on a touch panel similar to those used in the Netherlands. The other system, still in use in 2004, is based on a magnetic card and an electronic ballot marking device with a light pen.

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In 1994 the electronic voting experiment was extended to around 22% of the Belgian population. Every kind of voting area was tested: big cities, small villages, French speaking, Dutch speaking or legally speaking both languages.

In 1999 the system was extended to 44% of the population. However, due to lobbying from groups like PourEva and increasing doubt about the system, new tests were done and more controls were added. The most important test is the introduction of optical reading of paper ballots in two areas. This test was scheduled for 3 elections up to 2003 and was not re-conducted. The test was successful and gave no problems, despite this being the first election to use it. Optical reading of eVoting is Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail and guarantees the possibility of a human recount. The extra control introduced is the creation of an expert committee to monitor the electronic election process. That committee discovered the high dependency of the ministry of interior toward the vendor of the eVoting system.

In 2000 the local elections in Auderghem (part of Brussels) were contested in all available Belgian courts and the issue of legality of eVoting was raised before the European Court of Human Rights. The European court discarded the request without analysing the content.

In 2003 a new eVoting system was introduced to try to convince citizens that the system was safe. In the two locations that originally started eVoting, a "Ticketing" system was introduced. The principle of this is to add a printer next to the voting machine (magnetic card and light pen), and a paper copy of the vote is printed and approved by the voter. Once the elections are finished, all the paper votes (tickets) are counted and compared to the electronic result. In case of discrepancy, the paper version rules. The paper count and the electronic count matched nowhere, and it was decided (against the law) to favour the electronic result, which was considered more reliable. The law to organise this new test stated explicitly that this was for one election only.

In 2004, for the European Elections, all the tests were ended and all 44% of the population already voting electronically did so with the magnetic card. Ticketing or Optical Reading were no longer used. Since 1999 no further locations migrated from paper to eVoting. The equipment acquired in 1994 was not supposed to be used in 2004; however, the government chose to use it for one more year.

Reported problems

In the elections on 18. May 2003 there was an electronic voting problem reported where one candidate got 4096 extra votes. The error was only detected because she had more preferential votes than her own list which is impossible in the voting system. The official explanation was "the spontaneous creation of a bit at the position 13 in the memory of the computer". [1]

One likely explanation for the error was a single-event upset caused by a cosmic ray, which the voting system did not protect against. [2] [3] [4]

Furthermore, a sourcecode analysis of the DigiVote system in 2004 found several obvious errors with the security of the encryption keys, leaking of sensitive information, and lack of defensive secure coding practices. [5] [6] The voting system was also found to be vulnerable to a limited replay attack. [7]

Note that DigiVote is a trade name owned by German-based company Brähler ICS Konferenztecknik AG (also spelt Brahler and Braehler in non German speaking regions) [8] which manufactures battery powered radio audience response voting units for use in meetings and should not be confused with the ballot system used in Belgium.

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A ballot is a device used to cast votes in an election and may be found as a piece of paper or a small ball used in voting. It was originally a small ball used to record decisions made by voters in Italy around the 16th century.

A voting machine is a machine used to record votes in an election without paper. The first voting machines were mechanical but it is increasingly more common to use electronic voting machines. Traditionally, a voting machine has been defined by its mechanism, and whether the system tallies votes at each voting location, or centrally. Voting machines should not be confused with tabulating machines, which count votes done by paper ballot.

Electronic voting is voting that uses electronic means to either aid or take care of casting and counting ballots.

Data degradation is the gradual corruption of computer data due to an accumulation of non-critical failures in a data storage device. The phenomenon is also known as data decay, data rot or bit rot. This process leads to the slow deterioration of data quality over time, even if the data is not actively being used or accessed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Open list</span> Personalized list proportional voting system

Open list describes any variant of party-list proportional representation where voters have at least some influence on the order in which a party's candidates are elected. This is as opposed to closed list, which allows only active members, party officials, or consultants to determine the order of its candidates and gives the general voter no influence at all on the position of the candidates placed on the party list.

An electronic voting machine is a voting machine based on electronics. Two main technologies exist: optical scanning and direct recording (DRE).

Vote counting is the process of counting votes in an election. It can be done manually or by machines. In the United States, the compilation of election returns and validation of the outcome that forms the basis of the official results is called canvassing.

An absentee ballot is a vote cast by someone who is unable or unwilling to attend the official polling station to which the voter is normally allocated. Methods include voting at a different location, postal voting, proxy voting and online voting. Increasing the ease of access to absentee ballots is seen by many as one way to improve voter turnout through convenience voting, though some countries require that a valid reason, such as infirmity or travel, be given before a voter can participate in an absentee ballot. Early voting overlaps with absentee voting. Early voting includes votes cast before the official election day(s), by mail, online or in-person at voting centers which are open for the purpose. Some places call early in-person voting a form of "absentee" voting, since voters are absent from the polling place on election day.

Voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) or verified paper record (VPR) is a method of providing feedback to voters using a ballotless voting system. A VVPAT is intended as an independent verification system for voting machines designed to allow voters to verify that their vote was cast correctly, to detect possible election fraud or malfunction, and to provide a means to audit the stored electronic results. It contains the name of the candidate and symbol of the party/individual candidate. While it has gained in use in the United States compared with ballotless voting systems without it, it looks unlikely to overtake hand-marked ballots.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Election Systems & Software</span>

Election Systems & Software is an Omaha, Nebraska-based company that manufactures and sells voting machine equipment and services. The company's offerings include vote tabulators, DRE voting machines, voter registration and election management systems, ballot-marking devices, electronic poll books, ballot on demand printing services, and absentee voting-by-mail services.

A DRE voting machine, or direct-recording electronic voting machine, records votes by means of a ballot display provided with mechanical or electro-optical components that can be activated by the voter. These are typically buttons or a touchscreen; and they process data using a computer program to record voting data and ballot images in memory components. After the election, it produces a tabulation of the voting data stored in a removable memory component and as printed copy. The system may also provide a means for transmitting individual ballots or vote totals to a central location for consolidating and reporting results from precincts at the central location. The device started to be massively used in 1996 in Brazil where 100% of the elections voting system is carried out using machines.

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End-to-end auditable or end-to-end voter verifiable (E2E) systems are voting systems with stringent integrity properties and strong tamper resistance. E2E systems often employ cryptographic methods to craft receipts that allow voters to verify that their votes were counted as cast, without revealing which candidates were voted for. As such, these systems are sometimes referred to as receipt-based systems.

An optical scan voting system is an electronic voting system and uses an optical scanner to read marked paper ballots and tally the results.

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A ballot marking device (BMD) or vote recorder is a type of voting machine used by voters to record votes on physical ballots. In general, ballot marking devices neither store nor tabulate ballots, but only allow the voter to record votes on ballots that are then stored and tabulated elsewhere.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Election audit</span>

An election audit is any review conducted after polls close for the purpose of determining whether the votes were counted accurately or whether proper procedures were followed, or both.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic voting in the United States</span> Facet of American elections

Electronic voting in the United States involves several types of machines: touchscreens for voters to mark choices, scanners to read paper ballots, scanners to verify signatures on envelopes of absentee ballots, and web servers to display tallies to the public. Aside from voting, there are also computer systems to maintain voter registrations and display these electoral rolls to polling place staff.

References

  1. ↑ "Electronic Voting Random Spontaneous Bit Inversion Explained". Archived from the original on 2007-09-27. Retrieved 2006-11-07.
  2. ↑ Ferreira, Becky (2017-02-17). "How Space Weather Can Influence Elections on Earth". Vice. Retrieved 2019-08-04.
  3. ↑ "Cosmic particles are changing elections and causing planes to fall through the sky, scientists warn". The Independent. 2017-02-17. Retrieved 2019-08-04.
  4. ↑ "Bit Flip | Radiolab". WNYC Studios. Retrieved 2019-08-04.
  5. ↑ "Electronic Elections in Belgium: auditing the Digivote sourcecode". afront.be. 2004-07-08. Archived from the original on 2008-01-07. Retrieved 2019-08-04.
  6. ↑ "24/09/2003: An Independent Analysis of the May 2003 Election Code - PourEVA - Pour une Éthique du Vote Automatisé". www.poureva.be. Retrieved 2019-08-04.
  7. ↑ "Full Disclosure: Digivote replay attack". seclists.org. Retrieved 2019-08-04.
  8. ↑ "Brähler ICS own the trade name DigiVote". Archived from the original on 2011-08-10. Retrieved 2011-06-20.
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