Since our last post, internet voting in Switzerland has gone through some important developments. A draft federal law was put into consultation and an innovative transparency exercise took place at the beginning of 2019 : the publication of the source code of the Swiss Post/Scytl internet voting system and a public intrusion test on this very same system (from 25 Feb. to 24 March 2019).
The ultimate aim of these developments was to achieve the transformation of e-voting into an ordinary voting channel and to validate, after public examination, the suitability of the Swiss Post/Scytl internet voting system to offer internet voting for up to 100% of the electorate.
It is to be highlighted that this was the best example worldwide so far of achieving a high degree of transparency of an internet voting system used in elections. The Federal Chancellery and the Swiss Cantons have thus set a high transparency standard.
The results however were not the expected ones. Yet, the exercise yielded valuable insights into issues that need to be overcome before internet voting could realistically become an ordinary voting channel.
In a paper presented at E-Vot-ID 2019, I discuss some of these issues:
Other papers presented at E-Vot-ID 2019, including two interesting contributions on Swiss postal voting and on Swiss electors’ perception of e-voting, can be found here (2019 proceedings).
