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Online Voting in Switzerland

Its History and Use Today

Switzerland is a unique country in the world of voting for many reasons. First, unlike any other country where voting happens rarely (for example, once every 4 years), Switzerland holds elections 4 to 5 times a year. Second, most citizens vote remotely — according to the Federal Chancellery, about 95% of all votes are cast via the postal channel. Third, in general, the population is widely in favor of online voting.

Up to two-thirds of voters would choose to vote online if they could do so.

Thus, it is no surprise that Switzerland started considering online voting as early as 1998. Then, in 2000, the “Electronic Vote” project was launched for three piloting cantons: Geneva, Zurich and Neuchâtel. Fast forward four years, in 2004, and the Geneva canton ran the Swiss-first online voting trial for federal votes. The trial was a success. In the four communities of Geneva where online voting was available, 21.8% of the voters opted for the new voting method.

Since then, 15 out of 26 cantons have participated in similar trials and have run over 300 online voting trials in total. However, the history of online voting in Switzerland has not been linear. In 2019, online voting trials were temporarily halted after public penetration testing of a new system that had been certified for use by 100% of the voting population had highlighted a need for security improvements.

This year, after a four-year-long hold on online voting, Switzerland started trials again. For the first stage of trials, the Federal Council granted the three cantons of Basel-Stadt, St Gallen, and Thurgau licenses for online voting in federal votes throughout 2023–2025 and in the National Council elections on 22 October 2023. As a precaution, participation in the trial was granted to a limited number of voters. In total, around 65,000 voters were allowed to vote online from all three cantons, which is only 1.2% of all Swiss voters. Depending on the canton, eligible groups of voters were different:

• Basel-Stadt: Swiss citizens residing abroad and voters with disabilities.
• Thurgau: Swiss citizens residing abroad.
• St. Gallen: Swiss citizens residing abroad and voters from five pilot municipalities.

At the E-VOTE-ID conference this year, the Swiss Post presented some statistics regarding voters’ participation and preferences for online voting based on the successful election in June 2023. During the June 18 federal elections, 4,239 voters voted online out of 2.3M total ballots collected across all channels in Switzerland. Out of the 9,883 eligible abroad voters from Basel-Stadt, 2,596 cast votes and more than half of those (53,4%) chose to vote online. A similar dynamic was observed in Thurgau canton, where 56.2% of all votes cast by eligible voters from abroad came from the online voting channel.

While the current online voting trial seems small (only up to 1.2% of voters could have voted online), it was strongly supported by The Organization of the Swiss Abroad. Swiss citizens living abroad have been able to vote at the national level since 1992 by mail. Unfortunately, in some cases, the voting documents arrive late or cannot reach Switzerland in time for counting. Therefore, the Organization of the Swiss Abroad has systematically advocated for Swiss Abroad to be given the option of remote electronic voting, including submitting a petition in favor of online voting in 2018. The Organization of the Swiss Abroad, representing about 220,000 Swiss citizens living abroad, sees the resumption of online voting trial as a positive sign and hopes that as many cantons as possible will take advantage of this option.

Another organization that was vigorously in favor of resuming online voting trials was The Swiss Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired (SBV). The organization has been demanding the immediate resumption of trials since they were stopped because the lack of digital accessibility excluded hundreds of people from exercising their right to vote by creating significant barriers to their participation. To promote awareness of the issue, the association launched the campaign “Digital Accessibility. Now” for the population.

The people in favor of online voting have a reason to be hopeful. One more canton, Graubünden, recently announced that it will introduce electronic voting for 2024 elections. Hopefully, other cantons are considering such a possibility as well.

This article was written by Tamara Finogina (PhD), Cryptography Researcher at Scytl.