Electoral Council becomes Electoral Authority to monitor new voting software
The new software to calculate election results will not be ready before the 2021 parliamentary elections. The current Electoral Council will supervise the tendering of new voting software under the new name ‘Elections Authority’.
That writes Minister of the Interior Kajsa Ollongren in a letter to the House of Representatives. It describes, among other things, the results of a test that was held during the European Parliament elections in May this year. After those elections, a program director was appointed to supervise, among other things, the updating of the software used to calculate the distribution of seats after an election result.
Software is currently being used to calculate that result. The OSV, or Supporting Software Elections, is unsafe according to Ollongren. Security experts have been saying that for years, too. In the future there will be a new ‘digital tool’ to calculate the election results, but it will take a long time before it is available. The minister wants to use certain parts of the OSV, such as the technical aspects, as a basis for the new software. It will be built after a tender. However, for the security and reliability of the software, it is first necessary to better identify what exactly needs to be improved. That is what the new Election Authority will do. On the basis of the results of the authority’s investigation, a tender will be launched.
Ollongren warns that this new software will not be ready before the 2021 parliamentary elections. It will take a few more months before the inventory is completed, after which ‘bottlenecks’ must also be taken into account that can cost extra time. Ollongren says that the OSV will be used during the elections in November 2020 for the municipal reorganization and during the parliamentary elections of the following year. This is a ‘completely new version’ of the OSV, which should be a lot more reliable.
The new Election Authority should not only supervise the tendering of the OSV replacement, but will also be given powers to check that the software is not tampered with. That is why the Election Authority will also be ultimately responsible for provincial and local elections. However, the Electoral Act must first be amended to include the new powers.