How election software can fail (WHY2025)

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Experiences from a hacker working at the Election Council of The Netherlands. After critically following the elections for 8 years from the outside, a hacker was employed as one of the functional administrators of the software supporting the elections. Sharing experiences of the use of election software during 7 elections (2020-2023), from local, national to European in The Netherlands. A governmental software project with strict deadlines, and high security expectations. The software project for elections in The Netherlands is build an IT organization owned by German local governments. More than 10.000 Java files, what can possible go wrong? During this time multiple emergency patches were needed and incidents occur. Although at first explicitly not hired as a coder, within 3 months a Java code contribution was made that was unexpectedly more crucial than anticipated. This talk will show some incidents with the election software in The Netherlands: how the software failed, and when/how it was discovered. Go over how seeing the elections from the outside, and give some history of voting computers and software. Ending with some reflecting on the future. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://program.why2025.org/why2025/talk/MPH9CD/