A technical failure has forced the Swiss canton of Basel-Stadt to halt its electronic voting programme and investigate what went wrong. The canton was unable to decrypt 2,048 votes cast during national referendums held on March 8, leaving voters' choices locked inside an encrypted digital ballot box.
The votes belonged to Swiss citizens living abroad and people with disabilities eligible to vote electronically, but could not be counted because officials could not decrypt the electronic ballot box. Multiple attempts by IT experts to resolve the problem failed. The error did not lie with the e-voting system supplied by Swiss Post, but with how the canton's IT department handled external hardware.
According to the canton, the access code to open the encrypted ballot box was stored on a defective USB stick. Despite support from experts at Swiss Post and the Basel police, data recovery was not possible, and the canton abandoned its efforts on Saturday evening.
The uncounted votes represented about 3.4 percent of the turnout at that time, and the canton delayed publishing final results until March 21, 2026, leaving open the possibility that the votes might be recovered. To address the incident thoroughly and prevent similar errors, the canton has suspended its e-voting trial programme until at least December 31, 2026. The public prosecutor's office of Basel-Stadt has begun criminal proceedings.
The incident compounds existing concerns about Switzerland's decentralised approach to digital voting. The Federal Chancellery launched a comprehensive review of e-voting procedures in March 2019 after numerous flaws were discovered in Swiss Post's sVote system, illustrating the challenges of creating a secure internet voting system. In 2019, researchers from the University of Melbourne discovered security flaws in the system's commitment scheme, prompting politicians and experts to launch a public initiative calling for a five-year moratorium on online voting.
Critics including politicians and researchers warn that the Basel incident risks seriously undermining the credibility of e-voting at a time when Basel-Stadt aims to expand it to residents living within Switzerland. The episode provides fresh arguments to those who question the technical reliability of the system and damages the image of the project nationally.
The Federal Chancellery confirmed that e-voting in three other cantons (Thurgau, Graubünden and St Gallen), as well as Swiss Post's nationally used system, were unaffected. Basel-Stadt, St Gallen and Thurgau resumed e-voting trials in June 2023, with Graubünden beginning trials in March 2024. Current regulations permit a maximum of 30 percent of eligible voters in any canton to use e-voting, with a national cap of 10 percent, though current usage remains well below these quotas.
The incident has raised fundamental questions about whether Switzerland should continue its cautious experimentation with digital voting or intensify safeguards before expanding the programme further. Experts argue that trust remains the central issue: any citizen can understand the steps involved in paper voting, and if suspicions arise, a recount can be ordered, whereas e-voting replaces the visible paper record with encrypted data.