Estonia tenders an e-voting code audit, Dutch courts seek home security for judges, and a €2.5bn Slovak slip

Estonia orders a code audit of its e-voting system

Estonia€155,000Participation requests by 29 Oct

Estonia's Information System Authority has gone to market for a code audit of the national e-voting system: a €155,000, five-month engagement published on 29 September. The stated aim is assurance that the code is written to best practice and is "fit for publication", and that the application actually does what its documentation says. Estonia is the only country that offers internet voting to its entire electorate in national elections, and the calendar is tight: online voting for the March 2027 parliamentary election opens on 1 March, and by law the source code must be published before the test vote in February.

Publication is the sore point. Last October the Supreme Court found the electoral office had acted unlawfully by failing to publish the source code before the 2025 trial vote, while also finding the votes could not have been manipulated. The code itself has been public in some form since 2013, and on GitHub since 2017.

The team the authority wants is specific: an architect at home in C++ codebases, a certified cybersecurity expert versed in OWASP's application and mobile standards, and a cryptography specialist with experience analysing zero-knowledge-proof and elliptic-curve implementations. What exactly they will audit is less public. The technical specification goes only to shortlisted candidates who sign a confidentiality declaration carrying a €20,000 penalty per breach, and the draft contract forbids feeding the authority's confidential material into AI tools.

The system has been scrutinised before: a ministry-commissioned security audit reported in 2022, and the state Academy of Sciences ran a risk analysis in 2024. This is, however, the first stand-alone code audit of the e-voting system in our data, and the notice has drawn no press coverage. Requests to participate are due 29 October.

Source: original notice · Estonian translated (machine-assisted)

Britain tenders a one-way route for its caesium

United Kingdom£23m (≈€26.9m)Bids close 10 Nov

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority is tendering a £23m (≈€26.9m) single-supplier framework for the collection, dismantling, transport, interim storage and processing of caesium-137 sealed sources from irradiator units across the United Kingdom, with delivery to Sellafield. The notice names Operation Fieldfare, a Home Office-led programme that pays the health and research sectors to swap their caesium irradiators for safer technology, in the words of an earlier notice, "to reduce the likelihood of a terrorist using high risk radiological materials". Caesium chloride has long been cited as a dirty-bomb concern: soluble, dispersible and long-lived. The legal machinery is in place: a 2024 direction from the energy secretary routes the sources to Sellafield and bars their treatment or storage in Scotland. A pathfinder phase went to Eckert & Ziegler last September at £4.5m (≈€5.3m) for a dozen sources; this framework is the national rollout, three years from December with extensions. The United States has run an equivalent irradiator-replacement programme since 2014. We found no press coverage of the programme's procurement.

Source: original notice

The Dutch courts price the threat to their judges

Netherlands€4m over five yearsBids close 19 Nov

The Dutch judiciary's service centre is seeking a single national provider of home security for court staff who face elevated risk because of their function or circumstances: advice, installation, monitoring, alarm response and unspecified "special services", with award criteria that extend explicitly to employees' family members. The estimate is €800,000 a year excluding VAT, €4m over five years with a €6m cap, and the notice justifies the unusually long term by the contract's "safety-critical character". The sums are modest; the risk they address is documented. In a 2023 survey by the investigative platform Investico, more than half of Dutch judges and prosecutors reported threats or intimidation, a third of those linked to organised-crime cases. The Dutch Safety Board, reporting on the murders of the lawyer Derk Wiersum and the journalist Peter R. de Vries, recommended clarifying what protection employers owe alongside the state's own guarding system. This tender is the employer's layer, commissioned by the courts themselves. Bids close 19 November. Dutch media have not reported the tender.

Source: original notice · Dutch translated (machine-assisted)

ICE shops for holding space and an AI factory in the same week

United StatesValues not statedResponses by 6 and 16 Oct

On 25 September ICE posted two market surveys. The first seeks leased modular buildings at roughly 50 of its enforcement and removal offices; the agency lists 24 field offices, so the count reaches into sub-offices. The attached work statement, as first reported by Project Saltbox, describes 900-square-foot "Field Detention Units" designed for "secure holding and processing of detained individuals", plus interview units and a "Virtual Immigration Court Unit", at offices whose processing and holding capacity has been exceeded. Saltbox also reported that the document's metadata shows it originated from a GEO Group account; the company is ICE's largest private detention contractor. The second notice, from the chief information officer, seeks vendors for agency-wide AI, data and technology architecture; FedScoop reports it describes expanding the agency's STELLA chatbot platform into an "agentic software factory". The day before both notices, the Government Accountability Office put the detention funding in the 2025 budget reconciliation act at $45bn (≈€39.8bn) through 2029 and urged planning "to avoid further waste". Responses are due on 6 October for the buildings and 16 October for the AI survey.

Sources: modular buildings notice · AI and data RFI · reported by Project Saltbox and FedScoop

Bavaria's police specify their drone radar by name

GermanyValue not statedBids close 26 Oct

The Bavarian police logistics centre is tendering a two-year framework for mobile radar-based drone detectors for the force's Drone Competence and Defence Centre, opened at Erding in May with more than 40 staff. The notice names the product: the EchoShield radar panel from Echodyne Corp of Kirkland, Washington, an early Bill Gates investment. The procedure is formally open, but there is no "or equivalent" clause, so the competition is in practice among suppliers of one American product; price counts for 80%. The notice states no value. The centre was conceived days after drones closed Munich airport on two evenings in October 2025, and the incidents have continued: both Berlin Brandenburg runways shut for three quarters of an hour on 23 September, and Germany formally blamed Russia in September for an explosive-carrying drone that struck near a cargo aircraft at Leipzig/Halle in August. Bids close 26 October.

Source: original notice · German translated (machine-assisted)

Greece puts the KTEL era out to tender, slowly

Greece≈€3.56bn over ten yearsDeadlines 7 Oct–2 Nov

Three more regional notices landed on 29 September, completing a republication round that now covers all twelve of Greece's ten-year bus concessions: the competitive tendering, region by region, of the scheduled services run since 1952 by the KTEL cooperatives of private bus owners. The twelve concessions carry an estimated combined turnover of about €3.56bn over ten years excluding VAT, up to €5.35bn if every five-year extension is used. That is expected fare revenue, not public spending. The programme is a Recovery Fund reform milestone and has been widely covered in the Greek press; the notices record the delays. Western Greece is on its sixth TED version since April, deadlines have slipped by up to five months, and a Cypriot operator linked to Spain's ALSA has challenged terms, including a €24.7m annual-turnover threshold, as favouring the incumbents, who are merging to bid. Deadlines now run from 7 October to 2 November.

Source: Central Macedonia notice · Greek translated (machine-assisted)

Two numbers to disbelieve

Slovakia, France€2.53bn as filedBids close 9 Nov and 15 Oct

The most eye-catching number filed on TED this week was Slovak: €2,527,644,932, about 2% of the country's GDP, for the modernisation of a scientific data centre in Žilina and Bratislava, GPUs and AI services included. The buyer is the state scientific information centre CVTI, whose approved budget for the project in the government IT register is €32.2m; the finance ministry's value-for-money unit assessed it at €29.3m days before launch. Restore a decimal point (€25,276,449.32) and the filing fits its budget. The buyer had not corrected the notice as we went to press. In Toulouse, meanwhile, the €200,000,000 recorded against Tisséo's bus-subcontracting framework is not money at all. The notice itself explains: "the maximum amount of the framework agreement is set at 200,000,000 commercial kilometres". At the €3.79 a kilometre Tisséo paid in 2025, that ceiling would be worth about €760m over eight years, our arithmetic, not the buyer's. Procurement aggregators are already repeating both figures as euros.

Sources: Slovak notice · Toulouse notice · Slovak and French translated (machine-assisted)

Japan's racing gold goes to the heaviest bid

JapanValue not stated (prizes ¥1m–¥4.5m)Bids open 19–20 Nov

The Japan Racing Association published two notices for pure-gold prizes for winning racehorse owners at the Nakayama and Kyoto courses. The prize values are fixed by rule, from ¥4.5m (≈€25,200) for a Grade 1 win down to ¥1m (≈€5,600) for an ordinary race, so the tenders invert the usual logic. Under the association's "highest-weight award method", earlier notices show, the contract goes to whoever offers the most gold at or above a minimum weight the JRA sets; this year's full instructions are handed out in person at a November briefing. The association, the state-supervised operator of central horse racing that pays a tenth of betting turnover to the national treasury, runs such tenders through the year: last year's equivalent contracts for these two courses came to ¥129m (≈€723,000). The gold-price risk sits with the bidders. At Tokyo retail prices of about ¥23,300 (≈€131) a gram this week, a ¥1m prize buys about 43 grams of gold before fabrication, our arithmetic, not the association's. Bids are opened on 19 and 20 November.

Sources: Nakayama notice · Kyoto notice · Japanese translated (machine-assisted)

A sensor for the spray can

United Kingdom£1.44m (≈€1.69m)Interest by 28 Oct

Thameslink Southern Great Northern, the publicly owned operator of the Thameslink, Southern and Great Northern networks, is tendering for "Detection Technology for Graffiti Application in Concealed Toilet Environments": £1.44m including VAT, three years from August 2027, extendable to six. The one-line notice does not say how the detecting should work; its classification codes include electric sensors and, curiously, "biometric sensors". There is precedent abroad: Sydney Trains fitted sensors that detect spray-paint vapour and alert the control room, and credited them with more than 30 arrests by 2015. A £250,000 (≈€293,000) trial notice preceded this one in December 2025, aiming to "improve conviction rates" and work "toward providing an active deterrent". The operator repainted nearly 300 train toilets this year under a £3.6m (≈€4.2m) interior refresh, with vinyl surfaces chosen to deter graffiti. The new tender suggests the vinyls are not expected to win on their own. Expressions of interest close 28 October.

Source: original notice