German Court Says E-Voting Was Unconstitutional

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the well-how-about-that dept

It still stuns us that, despite so many problems found with e-voting technologies, that elections officials in the US seem to have no problem continuing to roll them out every election time, it looks like Germany is taking a slightly different perspective. A number of readers have sent in the news that Germany’s highest court hasn’t just rejected Germany’s use of e-voting technologies, but declared their usage in a 2005 election as unconstitutional, due to the unreliable nature of the machines and (more importantly) the fact that the black box nature of the machines made the elections not as transparent as required. That said… it also allowed the results from the election to stand, saying there was no actual evidence of mistakes. Still, perhaps other courts will start to recognize this as well: when you make the details of the election and how the results are counted totally secret, you cannot have a citizenry that believes that the election results were fair or accurate.

Filed Under: e-voting, germany