During Germany’s 18 September 2005 federal election, NEDAP ES3B direct-recording electronic voting machines were used in roughly 2,000 voting districts, allowing an estimated 2–2.5 million voters to cast ballots through the devices. The Wau Holland Foundation and Chaos Computer Club supported an investigation by security researchers Rop Gonggrijp and Willem-Jan Hengeveld, whose report argued that the machines required the public to place “ultimate trust” in their software because they produced official results that could not be independently verified. The researchers said the weakness arose from the machines’ fundamental design, not from an easily repairable defect. The campaign raised a serious democratic accountability problem, but the source does not establish that any election result was actually manipulated.
Many of the machines were subsequently decertified. On 3 March 2009, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court ruled that the Federal Electoral Equipment Ordinance governing electronic voting was unconstitutional because ordinary citizens could not understand or publicly scrutinize the vote-counting process without specialist knowledge. The court did not permanently prohibit electronic voting: it left open future use if authorities could guarantee reliable, constitutionally adequate accuracy controls. The ruling made transparency and independently verifiable results legal requirements for election technology in Germany.
