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A fully electronic voting system was piloted in the Finnish municipal elections on 26 October 2008. EDRi-member Electronic Frontier Finland (EFFi) had criticised the pilot program for years, recently releasing a report on its deficiencies.

Today, the Ministry of Justice revealed that due to a usability issue, voting was prematurely aborted for 232 voters. The pilot system was in use in three municipalities; this amounts to about 2 per cent of the electoral roll.

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Electronic Frontier Finland's (Effi's) 'shadow report' on the Finnish e-voting pilot has been translated into English and is available now on Electronic Frontier Finland web pages. The original Finnish version was published on 19 June 2008. The English version has been updated to include commentary on the University of Turku audit report.

Finland is piloting a direct recording electronic (DRE) type, polling station based (non-remote) e-voting system in its municipal elections in October 2008. In the proposed system, Effi argues that ensuring the correctness of the results is extremely difficult.

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A member of Electronic Frontier Finland (Effi), a Finnish association for promoting digital rights and member of EDRi, has recently sent a request of information to the Finnish Ministry of Justice regarding their planned e-voting system. The system will be piloted in the municipal elections during October 2008 and it is based on a DRE (Direct Recording Electronic) type e-voting system from TietoEnator Finland and a Spanish back-end provider, Scytl.

In their response, the Ministry of Justice states that, based on the Act on the Openness of Government Activities, the documentation that has been written concerning the specific details of the e-voting system has to be kept secret on the Documents that have to be kept secret

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All Nedap/Groenendaal voting machines were decertified on 1 October 2007 by District Court of Alkmaar in the Netherland, following the 'Voting with confidence' advice issued on 27 September by Korthals Altes Committee (created with the purpose to verify the validity of the systems), and the announcement of the Secretary for the Interior that the 'Regulations for approval of voting machines 1997' would be withdrawn.

The action is the result of an administrative law procedure started by 'We do not trust voting computers' foundation in March 2007. The foundation had issued a report in October 2006 that had examined the Nedap/Groenendaal ES3B in operation in 8 out of the 9 poling stations in the Netherlands. The

On 2 August 2007, the Electoral Commission, independent body set up by the UK Parliament, recommended in its evaluation on the pilot schemes used in May 2007 elections to end electronic voting trials until the establishment of a strategy by the UK Government to modernise the electoral system and make it more secure.

The Electoral Commissions considers that there would be not much further to learn from any more electronic voting trials, as lessons have been gathered during the trials that took place during the last seven years when the Ministry of Justice commissioned thirteen local authorities in England to run pilot schemes. The Commission believes that it is time the government drafted a clear plan to change the way to run these elections.

"We have learnt a good deal from pilots over the past few years. But we do

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Findings of the Open Rights Group Election Observation Mission in Scotland and England The Open Rights Group (ORG) believes that the problems observed at the English and Scottish elections in May 2007 raise serious concerns regarding the suitability of e-voting and e-counting technologies for statutory elections. E-voting is a 'black box system', where the mechanisms for recording and tabulating the vote are hidden from the voter. This makes public scrutiny impossible, and leaves statutory elections open to error and fraud.
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/e-voting-main/
http://media.ito.com/kevinmarks/org_election_report.pdf

Article 29 Working Party Opinion 4/2007 on the concept of personal data

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(Article corrected on 10 May 2007)

The electronic counting system used in the Scottish Parliamentary Elections on 3 May 2007 experienced problems as experts had warned and the Scotland Office announced an urgent investigation on the "serious technical failures" having delayed the announcement of results in several areas.

Several counts were delayed and about 140 000 votes (approx. 7% of the total votes cast) were not counted, probably due to confusing ballot design. Tabulation software problems also emerged in the e-counting system being used for the first time in Scotland.

The independent Electoral Commission, set up by the Parliament to monitor elections, had previously advised against running elections using two different voting systems on the same

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The first round of the presidential elections in France, where e-voting systems have been used in 82 localities as a pilot test, showed many queues, some equipement shutdowns and dropouts of some towns (Amiens, St Malo, Le Perreux, Ifs). Some political parties have called the e-voting a "catastrophe", demanding the withdrawal of electronic voting machines for the second round of the presidential election .

However, the main two points of the e-voting criticism, as explained by Pierre Muller from Ordinateurs-de-vote.org, are the loss of control by the citizens with the risk of major untraceable fraud and the humiliation for a great number of electors. The latter is explained by the fact that at