Political practice questions.

In 2009 the German Federal Constitutional Court held that the voting computers used in a national election were unconstitutional, because voters must be able to check the essential steps of an election without specialist knowledge. Which requirement was the court protecting?

• Equal access to polling stations for voters with restricted mobility
• The secrecy of the individual ballot at the moment it is cast
• Public verifiability of the count
• The right of parties to inspect the machines' source code under licence

Answer: Public verifiability of the count

The ruling did not claim the machines had miscounted; it held that a count no citizen outside the supplier can follow removes the public's ability to confirm the result, which is a condition of consent rather than a technical property. Secrecy and accessibility matter too, but a machine can satisfy both and remain unverifiable.

Estonia has offered internet voting since its 2005 local elections. A voter may cast an i-vote repeatedly during the advance period, and a paper ballot cast afterwards cancels the electronic one. Which problem is this rule mainly designed to reduce?

• Pressure on a voter casting a ballot in an unsupervised place
• The loss of votes if the central counting server becomes unavailable
• Two people sharing one identity card and voting twice with it
• Delay in publishing a result on the evening of the election

Answer: Pressure on a voter casting a ballot in an unsupervised place

The polling booth's guarantee is that nobody watches you vote, and remote voting gives that up, so Estonia restores it procedurally by letting a coerced ballot be overwritten later. The example shows an intervention answering a social risk with a rule rather than with cryptography.

During protests a government orders mobile operators to suspend data services across a region for several days, a measure recorded by monitoring organisations in countries including India, Ethiopia and Iran between 2019 and 2023. Which consequence for residents taking no part in the protests is the most direct?

• The material the government objects to is deleted from the platforms that hosted it
• Only the services named in the government's order become unreachable to residents
• Traffic is slowed so that video fails, while every other service keeps working
• Payments, ambulances and school lessons that use the same network stop as well

Answer: Payments, ambulances and school lessons that use the same network stop as well

A shutdown is indiscriminate by construction: it removes the carrier, so everything riding on it fails, which is why monitoring groups count medical and economic costs alongside political ones. Deliberate slowing is a different measure, easier for a government to deny and harder for users to prove.

Under the EU Digital Services Act, fully applicable since February 2024, the largest platforms must keep a public repository of the advertisements they carry, showing who paid for each one and which audience it was aimed at. Which problem does this obligation address?

• Advertising space costing small parties more for each viewer than large parties pay
• Campaign messages seen by one group remaining invisible to everyone else
• False claims being removed more slowly than the platform's own rules promise
• Adverts being delivered to users who have already decided how they will vote

Answer: Campaign messages seen by one group remaining invisible to everyone else

Broadcast advertising could be answered because everyone saw it, whereas targeted advertising can only be scrutinised if a record exists, so the repository restores the conditions for public argument instead of banning the practice. The intended users are journalists and researchers, not the regulator alone.

A United Nations fact-finding mission reported in 2018 that a social media platform had played a determining role in the spread of hate speech in Myanmar, where the company employed few reviewers able to read Burmese. Which implication for platform governance does the case point to?

• A platform's published rules do not apply outside the country where it is based
• Automatic translation removes the need for reviewers who read the language
• Moderation capacity is distributed unevenly between languages and markets
• Speech becomes unlawful only once a court has ordered a platform to remove it

Answer: Moderation capacity is distributed unevenly between languages and markets

The rules were global but the staffing was not, so an identical policy produced very different protection depending on the language a user wrote in. The accountability question sits in that gap between stated policy and enforcement capacity.

The Pegasus Project, published in 2021 by a consortium of news organisations working with Amnesty International's Security Lab, reported that the phones of journalists, lawyers and activists had been targeted with commercial spyware sold to government clients. Which implication for political life follows most directly?

• The encryption protocols used by messaging applications were shown to be broken
• Governments buying such tools are required to publish the list of their targets
• The spyware could reach a device only if the owner opened an attachment
• A source can no longer assume that speaking to a journalist stays private

Answer: A source can no longer assume that speaking to a journalist stays private

Compromising the device defeats end-to-end encryption without breaking it, because the message is read where it is displayed. The implication is chilling rather than technical: sources withdraw, and the loss falls on the reporting that is never published.