Swiss Post rolls out more secure version of e-voting platform
Opponents of e-voting have started a campaign to force a national vote on a moratorium for five years.
Keystone / Anthony Anex
The publicly-owned company Swiss Post, which had abandoned its electronic voting system in July over security concerns, has developed a new version.
This content was published on
2 minutes
SDA-Keystone/ac
“We have already proposed a solution” to cantons, said general manager Roberto Cirillo in an interview published by the La Liberté newspaper on Friday.
According to Cirillo, the company is in the process of defining the rules for testing the new system with cantons. He stressed that the new version will “contain universal verifiability”.
At the beginning of July, Swiss Post abandoned its electronic voting system, which means it now cannot be used for the October federal parliamentary elections. The decision was made after subjecting the e-voting system to an intrusion test by thousands of hackers last spring.
According to Swiss Post, they were unable to penetrate the electronic ballot box, but found serious errors in the source code, which had to be corrected. The cantons of Neuchâtel, Fribourg, Thurgau and Basel City had adopted this e-voting system, which only offered individual verifiability. Three of them already plan to demand compensation from Swiss Post for failure to deliver.
In June, canton Geneva also stopped operating its electronic voting system, which was also used by the cantons of Bern, Aargau and Lucerne. This left the Swiss Post platform as the last one standing until it was withdrawn as well.
As a result of Swiss Post’s problems, the Swiss government decided to suspend efforts to enshrine electronic voting in Swiss law. But it stressed that it had not given up completely on e-voting.
The central security mechanisms of Swiss Post’s e-voting systems are universal and individual verifiability. In the case of universal verifiability, the electoral authorities can check whether votes have been manipulated in the electronic ballot when counting votes. The check is comparable to the recounting of physical ballots. Universal verifiability enables independent control and verification of the ballot by the cantons.
In the case of individual verifiability, the voters receive verification codes on paper together with the voting documents. They compare the codes when they cast their vote with the codes shown on the screen, and can thus be sure that their vote has arrived correctly in the ballot box.
The new e-voting system has both mechanisms. The previous e-voting system only offered individual verifiability.
Source: Swiss Post
More
More
These are the arguments that sank e-voting in Switzerland
This content was published on
The idea of e-voting in Switzerland has been shelved for the moment. So what are the arguments against it?
Is your place of origin, your Heimatort, important to you?
Every Swiss citizen has a Heimatort, a place of origin, but many have never visited theirs. What’s your relationship with your Heimatort? What does it mean to you?
This content was published on
Swiss insurers Baloise and Helvetia have announced plans to merge into one company, becoming the largest employer in the Swiss insurance sector.
Swiss pharma giant Roche to invest $50bn in US within five years
This content was published on
After Novartis, fellow Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche plans to invest up to $50 billion in the US over the next five years.
This content was published on
WEF founder Klaus Schwab has announced his immediate resignation as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum.
A twin of the Milky Way existed in the young cosmos
This content was published on
A billion years after the Big Bang, there was already a spiral galaxy that resembles the Milky Way, according to the James Webb Space Telescope
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.
Read more
More
E-voting suffers another setback amid expat Swiss concerns
This content was published on
The government has decided to suspend efforts to enshrine electronic voting in Swiss law, but it plans to continue trials using improved systems.
This content was published on
After years of tests, Swiss e-voting is at a crossroads. The government wants to extend it; a cross-party campaign wants to stop it altogether.
No e-vote option for the Swiss parliamentary election
This content was published on
Swiss Post has suspended its e-voting system effectively spelling the end of the online trials with the current technology.
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.