E-Voting Pilot in Austria Cancelled by Constitutional Court
The Austrian Federal Constitutional Court cancelled the Austrian e-voting pilot conducted in 2009, cf. the Ruling of 13.12.2011 (in German). The pilot had been conducted in the 2009 Elections for the Austrian Student Association, which is an official representative body. Out of more than 230,000 students, only 2,000 had used e-voting. The pilot was objected to by several student groups as (i) unconstitutional, (ii) using a system that violated basic voting principles and (iii) violating privacy; those student groups then filed a formal complaint after the election.
On December 13, 2011, the Court ruled that the e-voting pilot of 2009 was null and void and furthermore canceled those parts of the Electoral Regulations for the Student Elections 2005 (in German) issued by the Ministry of Science and Research that enabled and regulated e-voting.
The Austrian e-voting pilot 2009 can hence be considered as failed.
More information on the pilot can be found at:
e-voting.cc (self-evaluation of the project participants)
Core elements of the Ruling include:
1. Non-territorial self-governing bodies as regulated in Art 120 of the Austrian constitution (eg, Chamber of Commerce, Chamber of Labour or the Student Association) are not automatically subject to the strict Voting Principles that apply to Federal or local elections. Rather, the Lawmaker may define the set of voting principles in the respective law (Remark: this may particularly refer to the equality of the vote, were for instance, larger companies have a higher degree of representation in the Chamber of Commerce). This point was already made in the interim
Decision of the Court of 30.6.2011 (in German).
2. The legal provisions in the Student Law (HSG) pertaining to e-voting (Art 34 and 39) were ruled as constitutional and sufficient safeguards. These provisions include that
- At no time voter and vote may be linked by the election committee or third parties.
- The voter must be sufficiently identified and his/her voting rights verified.
- The election committee must be able to perform its duties also in the electronic media.
The complaints filed against the respective provisions in the Student Law were hence rejected by the Court as unfounded.
3. The general provisions in the Student Law however, have to be stated more precisely and operationalised in the Electoral Regulations for the Student Elections. Those regulations were found insufficient by the Court and cancelled.
4. In particular, the Court objected to a system being used that anonymised the vote after it was cast in the electronic ballot box. This on the one hand violated the provision in Art 34 of the Student Law that "at no time voter and vote may be linked by the election committee or third parties" (my trans., my emph.).
On the other hand, the potential abuse of the data in the ballot box motivated the head of the election committee to delete all voting data only a month after the election, which left the Constitutional Court without any artefact to actually reproduce the election.
5. The Court considers it indispensible that the election committee (and not some system administrators) exercise full control over the electronic election and that the elections have to be fully reproducible by non-experts also in the electronic media.
Summarizing, the Constitutional Court did not only cancel the pilot in 2009, but in its Ruling also set some key requirements for any future use of e-voting in Austria.