Recently, the electronic voting pilot project of the Swiss canton of Basel-Stadt (Basel-Stadt) encountered a serious technical failure, resulting in 2,048 electronic votes that could not be counted in the national referendum held on March 8. At present, the state has completely suspended its electronic voting pilot work and launched related investigations.
On Friday afternoon, officials from the canton of Basel-Stadt announced the technical problem for the first time. The electronic voting pilot project mainly targets about 10,300 local voters living overseas and 30 people with disabilities. After discovering system anomalies, officials urgently called on participants to send paper ballots to city hall or go directly to polling stations to vote, but admitted that this was difficult for many voters overseas or with limited mobility.
As of Sunday, when voting lanes closed, the electronic voting system had collected a total of 2,048 votes. However, in the subsequent vote counting process, despite the intervention of professional IT personnel, officials in the canton of Basel-Stadt were still unable to use officially provided hardware equipment to decrypt these ballots. Official spokesman Marco Greiner told Swiss Broadcasting Corporation: "The staff used three USB flash drives at that time, and the passwords entered were all correct, but none of the USB flash drives worked properly."
In response to this serious vote counting accident, the state government has commissioned a third-party agency to conduct an independent external technical analysis of the incident and expressed its deep apology for the damage to the political rights of the affected voters. According to official assessments, these unreadable votes accounted for less than 4% of the total votes cast in the canton of Basel-Stadt, which was not enough to make a substantial change in the final referendum result. Despite this, the state decided to delay the confirmation of final voting data until March 21, while freezing the electronic voting pilot project until the end of December this year. At the same time, the local public prosecutor's office has officially launched criminal proceedings in this matter.
After the incident, the Swiss Federal Chancellery responded quickly, clarifying that the other three cantons (Thurgau, Graubünden and St. Gallen) that are conducting electronic voting pilots, as well as the national Swiss Post electronic voting system, were not affected by this technical failure. Considering that mail-in votes take a long time, in order to facilitate overseas citizens to exercise their voting rights, Switzerland has currently implemented small-scale electronic voting pilots in 4 of its 26 states. It is worth noting that this is not the first setback in Switzerland’s electronic voting process. As early as 2019, the Swiss government was forced to suspend an electronic voting plan because cybersecurity researchers discovered major security vulnerabilities in the software source code.
It is reported that two core issues in the referendum held on Sunday focus on the retention and acquisition of physical cash. Voting results showed that nearly three-quarters of voters supported a government proposal to formally write the "Swiss National Bank's obligation to supply physical cash and maintain the status of the Swiss franc" into the national constitution; while another similar proposal initiated by civil activists was narrowly rejected. Interestingly, although the public supports cash at the constitutional level, relevant data shows that Switzerland actually has one of the lowest cash usage rates in Europe, with only 30% of all physical transactions in 2024 involving banknotes or coins.