Law Technology

Bizarre Undervote on iVotronic in France

By Andrew Appel

In France, most municipalities use paper ballots in elections, but a few places have begun using DRE (direct-recording electornic) machines. Pierre Muller, a French computer scientist, has recently sent me a report of a malfunction by an ES&S iVotronic machine in a recent municipal election.

In this spring’s elections (and he believes this also happened last year), there have been some unexplained “undervotes” on iVotronic machines. Below is a printout from an iVotronic machine. There’s a line “UnderVotes For Above Contest: 1″. Since the voter is required by the user-interface to choose between a candidate and the choice “vote blanc” [none of the above], undervotes should not be possible.

This event is similar in some ways to the Sequoia AVC Advantage bug observed in New Jersey on February 5, 2008. In both cases it appears that the machine is producing results that should not be possible, and in both cases local election officials are unable to explain how these results could legitimately be obtained.

Here is the relevant portion of the printout:

I’ve also prepared a larger image of the full printout, annotated with my English translation.

Full post as published by Freedom to Tinker on April 30, 2008 (boomark / email).