It is quite independent in Italy actually. The government is pushing for a constitutional amendment to help "fix" this feature. There is going to be a referendum on the change very soon.
Ask any Romanian and they'll tell you they're not. Ask them about the Mario Iorgulescu case [1], with the Italian justice system refusing to extradite him here to Romania only because his (wealthy) dad paid the right people off. And Iorgulescu is not the only such case.
the current reform is complicated, and reasonable people can disagree on how to vote, but it goes a bit further than separating prosecutors from judges.
Namely, it also changes the self-regulating body (the CSM, Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura) of the judiciary so that the government and parliament have a bit more authority and the judiciary have a bit less: the organ is split in two, its judiciary members are no longer elected but picked randomly while a part is decided by the political side, and there's an even higher special tribunal.
Proponents say this is necessary, opponents say this is leading towards stronger power of the political majority over the judiciary.
Now, roughly one third of CSM members is nominated by the Parliament and the other one is elected by judges, according to the "correnti" (a sort of parties)
> The government is pushing for a constitutional amendment to help "fix" this feature. There is going to be a referendum on the change very soon.
Italian here.
It's not like that: the referendum is about definitely enforcing the career separation about public persecutor and judges.
Actually they are under the same authority and the member of this authority are elected according to a sort of political parties (unique case in the whole EU) and this creates some distortions in career growths and nominations.
The new schema will create two different authorities and the members will be selected according to a ballot.
A similar proposal was made by the left wing parties few years ago, when they were at the government
It is not even about understanding. It is about how easy it is to distrust it.
Contrary to what nerds think, the goal of elections isn't to get bulletproof results by mathematical standards. The goal is to create agreeable consent among those who voted. A good election system is one where even sworn enemies can begrudgingly agree on the result.
A paper ballot system has the advantage that it can be monitored by any group that has members which have mastered the skill of object permanence and don't lie. That is not everybody, but it is much better than any hypothetical digital system
> The goal is to create agreeable consent among those who voted.
If you still consistently miscount so that popular power isn't aligned with the electoral results, you will still face all the problems a democracy was designed to avoid. Starting with violent protests and revolutions.
But then, most countries fail this at other stages already.
So you double-count, you checksum (our table just tallied 100 ballots, do our vote counts sum to 100? good, keep going), you checksum some more (does our total vote count amount to the number of registered votes in this poll station), you film everything, and ideally you do this with volunteers drafted on election day.
Sure. But that problem is not inherent to paper ballots. In fact miscounting (read: manipulation) is even easier and harder to detect with digital systems.
More importantly, you want your system to be bulletproof before it's audited. By the time you're talking about audits, the populists have already started flooding the zone.
The system should be so obviously secure that any person walking into a poll station should intuitively understand, seeing the poll workers, why fraud would be very hard to perform, so that when their favourite populist candidate loses and claims fraud, they think "that doesn't make sense".
If the voter needs to read technical documentation to understand why the populist is wrong, it's already too late.
How about a machine voting system with paper fallback. You as a voter can review the paper protocol from your vote. If there is distrust, the justice system can review the paper trail as well.
I don't understand the reason for electronic voting. The UK manages to tally up paper votes overnight, even from far-flung Scottish islands. Electronic voting is literally solving a problem that nobody has.
So more populated countries have more potential poll workers to choose from. Isn't this a linear relationship? What does size have to do with anything?
UK population density (people/sq km) is 289 and Switzerland's is 228, so not very different. Plus Switzerland is fully connected, there are no remote islands.
What is the rush to tally the ballots? Do we need an _instant_ count? Isn't that actually a negative attribute as far as security is concerned?
The distance between the election and the taking of the office is often months. I just don't understand why electronics need to be involved at all in this system.
> If your system takes longer than that, it's a bad system.
Why?
> which can take effect more or less immediately.
In our jurisdictions they're usually reserved. Courts can be used to challenge laws as unconstitutional. And you typically want a bright line implementation date that everyone can see coming.
Because hand-counting of paper ballots, as done in Switzerland (and many other places) is the bare minimum. Any more complicated system that still takes longer is adding complication unnecessarily. An electronic election system should be able to count all the ballots basically instantaneously.
In Switzerland the courts have no power to rule laws as unconstitutional - this is a power reserved to the people (who are sovereign), via referendums. So when the people strike down a law at referendum, that takes effect immediately as the voting population is the "final instance". Usually when they vote positively for something, there is still then some implementation period - sometimes quite a lot of it, e.g. there was a vote to reform the tax system passed on Sunday, and it will take effect according the government at the start of _2032_.
What is the need for it? You want faster results? Not needed, elections don't need to be fast, they need to be trusted. You want to have less humans in the loop to be more efficient? Having humans in the loop is actually a feature not a bug as it distributes the trust on many actors.
Paper ballots work just fine if done correctly and most democracies have a long history of knowing how to do them correctly with very high stakes.
Electronic (or even online) votes are fine for low stakes stuff, like what the color of that new bridge ought to be, but not to select the fate of a whole nation.
> the goal of elections isn't to get bulletproof results by mathematical standards. The goal is to create agreeable consent among those who voted. A good election system is one where even sworn enemies can begrudgingly agree on the result.
First you must explain to them why the former is not an example of the latter.
Just imagine you have to explain a child in kindergarden how the collective choice is made. Raising hands works. Putting different pieces of paper into a jars works. Magical machine says the result was X does not work unless they trust it, regardless of how correct the magical machine was under the hood, because the majority lacks the skill of intuitively understanding this themselves. Sure, they could trust an expert or an figure of authority, but that is a fleeting thing. A fleeting thing that may be enough for inconsequencial decisions, but not enough to steer countries.
Even I as someone who would have the skillset to understand why it has to be correct would have an easier time verifying a paper ballot process than ensuring that network connected complexity behemoth was running the program I checked for weeks correctly in any moment during an election. And even if you had a way to guarantee that, who tells me this was the case in the whole country or thst evidence wasn't faked a millisecond before I checked?
Meanwhile with paper and poll watchers from each party it is very easy to find actual irregularities and potential tampering — trust is a gradual thing with paper while it is much more binary with digital. If there is a sign for the digital machine being untrustworthy you can throw the whole result into the bin.
That's easy to explain. We live in a world where A&W's 1/3rd pound burger failed to compete with the McDonald's 1/4th pound burger because 4 is bigger than 3 so people thought the McDondald's product was bigger. There's zero hope that this public will understand fancy encryption.
> eVoting cannot be understood and audited by normal citizens, not even by nerdy ones.
I suggest you explain the verifiability of evoting systems to your grandma or your friend with an art degree. Then ask them to explain the same to their peer while you just listen. Then repeat the exercise with paper voting. You will see the difference.
This is the point. The way you carry out elections need to optimize for not having the loser riot on the streets, nearly all other considerations are secondary: speed, efficiency, etc.
It is also interesting which role human psychology plays in this. Trump for example used the late trickeling in of the mail vote to incite the January 6th riots. His followers found it shady that the gote changed in the end.
Also e-voting can be hacked (I guess they vote from their computer/smartphone, which can be hacked from the other side of the world). The last place you want to care about phishing, IMO, is voting.
Good luck hacking in-person voting or even "physical" mail voting from the other side of the world.
Regular ballot voting can also be hacked and on a scale. Making ballots invalid while counting them, or modifying them in some form or other, intentionally writing wrong values in the counting protocols...
And of course controlled vote or paid vote...
E-voting can and has also led to exposing voting fraud -- see Venezuella.
Yeah but it cannot be hacked from the other side of the world. I think it's a different kind of threat.
If an attacker from somewhere else in the world want to tamper with their votes, they have to get Swiss people to modify the ballots, or get their agent to learn Swiss-German, good luck with that :D.
As a Swiss citizen I strongly disagree. Most people capable of reading and basic maths (addition!) can understand the counting of our paper ballots. My kids understand how this works since they are like 5.
Any citizen can go and check how votes are counted in their Geminde. Any citizen can check what is reported in the federal tally. I did several times. It's not rocket science.
If i have one regret over the OOXML corruption scandal was to not bring the whole thing to court. We had some many evidences of Microsoft captureing the whole process.
They cannot loose markets, like California or Brazil.