Scytl’s 2014: Annus horribilis, or may be not

2014 was a peculiar year for the noisiest, albeit not the only Spanish company specialized in voting technology and solutions. Despite some major setbacks resulting from ill-developed voting solutions, it managed to close a $104 million financing round this year.

Image: Pixabay

The year had a bumpy start for Scytl. For Ecuador’s 2014 Sectional elections in February, Scytl was to deliver a solution that would help the Ecuadorian Election Commission to process the tallying of the votes with the goal that results could be announced within 72 hours after closing the polls. Yet, one whole month after the election was over, Scytl was still counting votes and was still unable to provide final results. In the mean time, Ecuadorian authorities were confronting the herculean task of convincing public opinion that the results would “soon be announced”- were legit. As a result of the scandal and ensuing public unrest, Domingo Paredes, head of the electoral management body, declared that the Election Commission had unilaterally terminated the contract, demanded payment of guarantees, and began taking legal actions against the company. Oddly enough, after the fanfare published in Scytl's website news in February and March about projects "in the works" as if the February election had been "a successful implementation", there has been a complete silence on Ecuador the following months.

A few months later (June) Norway —one of the countries leading the crusade to make internet voting a reality, and a client of the Barcelona-based company—, halted i-voting experiments amid security fears. As evidenced in the video posted by the Norway electoral authorities (2:31:13), the secrecy of 54% of the vote was in fact compromised during the September 2013 pilot due to a bug in the encryption key. These cryptography issues were also reported in the Expert Study Mission Report from the Carter Center.

Even though bad news are the ones usually travelling faster, neighboring Peru seems not to have found out about Ecuador’s ordeal with Scytl. And only five months after the infamous incident aforementioned, the National Office for Electoral Processes (ONPE) of Peru experienced first-hand the mishaps of a poorly designed in-site Internet voting solution. In August, while conducting an Internet voting pilot using Scytl technology, voters ran into all sorts of trouble to cast a ballot. In spite of the simplicity of the contest –only 186 polling centers serving 34,672 voters– the company was once more unable to deliver up to the expectations.  

To cap off the year, on October 27, Scytl ran into trouble once again— this time staged by its branch in Canada, while providing its internet voting platform for elections in 20 Ontario municipalities.

According to the company, five election files had been mislabeled due to human error, creating tabulations problems that delayed results. On November 6, the 20 municipalities got together to discuss the issues and demand explanations. Scytl apologised and offered a discount of 25% from the charges for their services, plus a 10% discount on a future project, as if Ontario's woes were of financial nature. Read more here.

In spite of all these incidents, Scytl managed to raise over 100 million dollars from capital investors. Among them: Vy Capital, Vulcan Capitan and Sapphire Ventures, formerly SAP Ventures – the independent venture capital firm associated to Europe’s largest software company.

Scytl’s PR department deserves a standing ovation for not allowing such a poor track of performances ruin a financing round; especially in the age of global communications and instant scandals when such blunders happen.

Internet Voting, Strike Two!

Image: India Times

In a previous post we mentioned how the alluring idea of Internet Voting was captivating audiences the world over. And no wonder why, the convenience of casting a vote from a personal computer, or a tablet, while seating in front of a TV and watching a sitcom, could hardly be debated. However, we also pointed that we are still have a ways to go until a secure, transparent, and accurate online voting solution hits the market. 

Two recent episodes involving notorious brands (TIME, OSCARS) and this novel technology, left clear evidence of its shortcomings, and serve to illustrate the forces preventing this widely popular idea, from spreading throughout the world.

The first one of these episodes, which we termed Strike One, occurred in December 2012 when the traditional Man of the Year award from TIME Magazine opened online voting to the general public through a website. Although the selection of the winner is not based on this online election, it is used to get a feel of what audiences are thinking. TIME executive editor Radhika Jones said "While we don't make our selection based on the poll results, it's always interesting to see where some of our preferred candidates end up". 

But theory only resembles reality in theory. The smart PR move was overshadowed by a group called 4Chan who hacked TIME's web site to rig the elections, and gave Kim Jong-Un Korean Leader the first prize as Person of the Year 2012. Much to the regret of the organizers, the experiment turned costly, at the very least from the PR perspective.   

This incident surfaces one of the most pressing concerns facing online voting, that is, security. As of now, there is no way to fully guarantee the integrity of the elections when the votes are cast through the Internet. 

Image: Mashable.com

Strike two is an on-going story involving the 85^th Academy Award nominations for the 2013 Oscars. This year online voting was introduced as a means to facilitate the casting of the votes. To avoid security glitches like the ones TIME magazine suffered,  strict security measures were taken into account. However, in this case, if the developers of the voting platform succeeded keeping away hackers from intervening in the election, they also succeeded keeping the more than 5,700 members eligible to vote from casting their vote in a user-friendly fashion. 

Since voting began on December 17,  numerous complaints were made, forcing authorities to extend the voting deadlines until January 4th. According to a lengthy analysis by The Hollywood Reporter, the complex password system developed to avoid voter impersonation was proving cumbersome for most voters. Log in problems were not confined to those who stereotypically present problems  with computers as even the most tech savvy members of the Academy expressed discomfort with the new system. 

In our opinion, Internet voting will probably not see a strike three, and most likely will hit a home-run when it is mature enough, nonetheless, to avoid being called out, this at-bat needs to be delayed for a while.