Germany
In Germany the only accredited voting machines after testing by the PTB for national and local elections are the ESD1 and ESD2 from the Dutch company Nedap. About 2000 of them have been used in the 2005 Bundestag elections covering approximately 2 million voters. These machines differ only in certain details due to different voting systems from the ES3B hacked by a Dutch citizen group and the Chaos Computer Club on October 5, 2006. Because of this, additional security measures have been applied in the municipality elections on 22. October 2006 in Cottbus, including reading the software from the EPROM to compare it with the source and sealing the machines afterwards. The city of Cottbus ultimately decided not to purchase the Nedap voting system it had previously been leasing.
At the moment there are several lawsuits in court against the use of electronic voting machines in Germany. One of these reached the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany in February 2007. Critics cite a lack transparency when recording the votes as intended by the voter and concerns relating to recounts. The certified Nedap machines are DRE systems which do not produce any paper records.
Following a 2005 pilot study during the national elections, wide public support and a unianimous decision by the Senate launched a plan for the implementation of an optical scan voting system based on digital paper in the 2008 state elections of Hamburg. After unsubstantiated public claims is September 2007 by the Fraktion der Grünen/GAL and the Chaos Computer Club that the system vulnerable, the National Election Office (Landeswahlamtes) found in public surveys that while the systems usability was widely accepted, public distrust of the system was evident. Due to concerns over public confidence plans for use of the new voting system have been canceled. However, the Federal Office for Security in Information Technology (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik) will continue the certification process of the Digital Pen.
Read more about this topic: Electronic Voting Examples
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