E-vote trials face high hurdles for elections

Electronic voting on a large scale is not on the cards for October’s parliamentary elections, but limited trials are likely to continue this year. The government will decide in June on the extension of the tests, which are currently underway in about half of the country’s 26 cantons, and among registered Swiss expatriates. E-voting remains one of the political priorities of the Organisation of the Swiss Abroad (OSA), which represents the nearly 700,000 expatriates living in all four corners of the world. For some time registered Swiss citizens living abroad have been able to cast postal ballots in votes and elections in Switzerland. But complaints about the slow, and in some countries insufficiently reliable, service underscore the need for e-voting to give the expat community its democratic rights. “The mail sometimes arrives here with a delay of a month, making it impossible to participate in Swiss polls,” said Pierino Lardi, who lives in Venezuela. Postman ...