Finnish government not moving election system to AWS for now
The Finnish Ministry of Justice wanted to move a computer system for election processing to AWS. This decision has been temporarily reversed.
Finnish Parliament in Helsinki
(Image: Werner Pluta / heise medien)
Preferring domestic servers: The Finnish government has temporarily abandoned its plan to move the country's election system to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Next year's parliamentary elections will be processed on the existing in-house servers.
The decision was made after an evaluation of a decision from 2025, reports the US business news agency Bloomberg. The Ministry of Justice wanted to move all data on candidates, voters, and vote counting to AWS.
However, the international political situation has changed in the past twelve months, according to a statement from the Finnish government. The Ministry of Justice has therefore decided to review the decision on how the election platform should be hosted. The decision will be postponed to a later date.
Paper ballots
Elections in Finland are conducted using paper ballots. However, the computer system processes lists of polling stations, candidates, and voters. It is also used for counting votes and publishing results.
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Following the entry into force of the US Cloud Act, which obliges US companies to hand over data to US authorities regardless of storage location, as well as due to the current political situation in the USA, trust is dwindling on the European side. Experts and politicians are urging official bodies and companies to become independent of US providers in the interest of technological sovereignty. This applies primarily to hyperscalers Amazon, Microsoft, or Meta, who are trying to exert pressure on the European Union through the US government to override regulations such as the Digital Services Act.
(wpl)
