Open letter to Swiss Parliaments and Chancellery

Internet, 14.03.2012 – On the website of the Swiss Federation it was revealed on Monday [1] the existence of major flaws of the evote system developed by Canton of Geneva. As confessed by the Chancellery, a voter, establish abroad, was able to vote twice in Canton Lucerne. His ballot was then removed from the results. The Chancellery is still talking about a success. Signatories to this letter request the complete stop to the tests. This non-transparent evote system is obviously not working.

Throughout the last voting period, the uniqueness of the ballots was not constantly guaranteed. The recorded result was clearly wrong. While insisting on having acted «in a professional manner», the Swiss administration has been deliberately modifying the result to correct the flaw [2]. This is implying that the anonymity of the ballot was not respected directly violating Swiss federal law on political rights.

With the entire secret surrounding the development and design of the evote system, we can only fear that other errors have already occurred. We question the reliability and security of data transferred, as well as the proposed system itself. We are also concerned about how surprisingly easy it was to manipulate the results to recover a computer error and how this was called a success by the Federal Chancellery.

An OSCE report [3] does point out the flaw of the Geneva evote system sharing its concern about security and request more transparency. Also in the beginning of this month, it was made public that the security of an American evoting system was compromised [4] in only a few hours. This demonstrates again the high level of vulnerability of evoting system.

We request the complete and immediate stop of all experiments as well as the cancellation of the electronic ballots. We request immediate online publication of the source code so it can be studied in satisfying conditions. Finally we request that a public and independent commission performs an audit on the conditions surrounding the development of the software as well as a security audit.

References
[1] Success of evote test in twelve cantons (French) : http://www.news.admin.ch/message/index.html?msg-id=43719&lang=fr
[2] Official press release of Geneva Canton (French) : http://www.ge.ch/evoting/scrutin_20120311.asp
[3] OSCE Report : http://www.eda.admin.ch/etc/medialib/downloads/edazen/topics/intorg/osce.Par.0017.File.tmp/120130_odgal0077%20final%20report.pdf
[4] American evote system compromised: http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/US-e-voting-system-cracked-in-less-than-48-hours-1463881.html

For the full list of signatories please read the French version.