The city of Hamburg will not be using Diagramm Halbach’s solution at the election in February 2008

Lund, 23rd of November 2007 – A political coalition of CDU, SPD and GEL has decided not to use Diagramm Halbach’s e-voting system, based on Anoto’s digital pen and paper at the election on the 24th of February 2008 in the city of Hamburg. . The decision has been made due to the debate resulted by media actions taken by the hacker organisation Chaos Computer Club (CCC). CCC claims to have found security flaws in the voting system. They have presented a scenario where the election results are manipulated by the copying and pasting in individual ballots. The described scenario is based on that the real ballots in some way would be replaced by manually manipulated ones. How a big scale attack with such hand made voting ballots would be realized has not been presented. Neither has the method of attack been tested against the real system’s inbuilt security processes.


Despite the completion of acknowledgement and certification processes, the political majority in Hamburg has chosen not to use the solution at the election in February 2008, due to the media debate.

The co-operation between Diagramm Halbach and Anoto will continue according to plan and Anoto is still looking at the market segment of e-voting systems with interest.