Researchers have found a critical flaw in the Swiss Internet voting system. I was going to write an essay about how this demonstrates that Internet voting is a stupid idea and should never be attempted — and that this system in particular should never be deployed, even if the found flaw is fixed — but Cory Doctorow beat me to it:

The belief that companies can be trusted with this power defies all logic, but it persists. Someone found Swiss Post’s embrace of the idea too odious to bear, and they leaked the source code that Swiss Post had shared under its nondisclosure terms, and then an international team of some of the world’s top security experts (including some of our favorites, like Matthew Green) set about analyzing that code, and (as every security expert who doesn’t work for an e-voting company has predicted since the beginning of time), they found an incredibly powerful bug that would allow a single untrusted party at Swiss Post to undetectably alter the election results.

And, as everyone who’s ever advocated for the right of security researchers to speak in public without permission from the companies whose products they were assessing has predicted since the beginning of time, Swiss Post and Scytl downplayed the importance of this objectively very, very, very important bug. Swiss Post’s position is that since the bug only allows elections to be stolen by Swiss Post employees, it’s not a big deal, because Swiss Post employees wouldn’t steal an election.

But when Swiss Post agreed to run the election, they promised an e-voting system based on “zero knowledge” proofs that would allow voters to trust the outcome of the election without having to trust Swiss Post. Swiss Post is now moving the goalposts, saying that it wouldn’t be such a big deal if you had to trust Swiss Post implicitly to trust the outcome of the election.

You might be thinking, “Well, what is the big deal? If you don’t trust the people administering an election, you can’t trust the election’s outcome, right?” Not really: we design election systems so that multiple, uncoordinated people all act as checks and balances on each other. To suborn a well-run election takes massive coordination at many polling- and counting-places, as well as independent scrutineers from different political parties, as well as outside observers, etc.