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Comment by johansch | Hacker News Reader

... well, wow. (Great summary.)

How widely is this system used in the the german national elections? Is it just one of the states? (Which one?)

Note that this isn't a system running in the voting booth. All votes are cast on paper ballots. The software is just for tabulating the results and maybe maintenance of the voting rolls.

It's obviously a terrible situation, but I'm somewhat confident that you couldn't actually throw the election even with complete access. I, for example, always stop by at a polling place a friend volunteers at after the polls are closed and watch them count the ballots. Everyone is free to observe, and you can get as close as you could want, and count the ballots yourself.

There are only a few hundred voters per precinct, so any person can, if they want, verify their (or another) precinct's results end-to-end: count some or all the ballots, then compare with the results posted online.

The volunteers manning the polling places are also incredibly dedicated and professional. I'm pretty sure that at least one of them also verifies the data. It's a diverse crowd (not, for example, party officials or public servants), which makes it practically impossible to get their buy-in to any corruption.

> and you can get as close as you could want, and count the ballots yourself

It usually is no problem if they do but an outside observer should not touch the ballots themselves and is not allowed to. They can look closely though which gives them the same degree of certainty.

One more info: this software is just used for the preliminary results, not for the final results.

The software for the final results is entirely different and seems to be much more secure.

Knowing how German government offices operate, the "software" for the final results is likely sending letters stamped with an official seal by post and calculating the result manually/with very low-tech software.

Which is how election results should be handled. Sealed letters are cheap and extremely hard to forge.

The two products by "vote IT", one of which is the vulnerable "PC-Wahl", are used by 2700 authorities, responsible for ~66% of Germans. ("Insgesamt haben 2.700 Behörden die Produkte von vote iT lizensiert. Damit werden für rund 66 % der Einwohner Deutschlands die Wahlen mit unseren Produkten organisiert und präsentiert.") [1]

[1] https://vote-it.de/

That's insanely messed up. Very high level heads have got to roll for this, right? Like at least one direct report to Merkel?

Direct reports to Merkel have absolutely nothing to do with this. This software was procured by local authorities which are completely independent from the federal government. Even if Merkel wanted, she has no authority whatsoever on local authorities.

Ok.

So maybe one conclusion is that the responsibility for the voting process should be on the federal level, then.

What indication do you have that any federal solution would be better than the state one? They're operating under the same laws and RFP/selection requirements.

The only difference at the federal level would be it affects 100% of Germans instead of 66%.

So my theory was: Having a federal, shared solution would allow more money to spent on this. Thus avoiding embarassing fuckups like this one.

Anyway, I just think you should scrap all electronic voting; your local regional governments clearly don't have the chops to avoid idiotic things like this. Just go back to paper ballots. They work fine!

We still have paper ballots. This whole story is only about the software that calculates the numbers announced on election night (i.e. does a bit of summation of the manual counts).

Ah.

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