Important articles
The Problem With Voting Machines
Bruce Schneier is a vital information source to keep track of news in the area of cryptography and security. In 2004 he published an article on his blog entitled The Problem With Voting Machines. At the start of that article he summarizes the four required characteristics of a voting system: accuracy, anonymity, scalability and speed.
Accuracy means both correctly capturing voter intent in a cast vote record of some form and then protecting it from modification, loss or forgery. Anonymity is the same as ballot secrecy or voter privacy - the principle that a voter’s identity can in no way be determined from the cast vote record. Scalability refers to the ability for the systems to handle the large surges of usage that come on election day, as well as the complexity of overlapping jurisdictions. Speed means the ability for the system to produce official results rapidly.
Schneier’s recommendation is twofold - first that all DREs must use VVPAT and second that software must be open to public scrutiny.
Why Johnny Can’t Vote
Barbara Simons is a past president of the Association for Computing Machinery and expert on voting systems. In March 2005 she wrote a valuable editorial in the APS News. I highly recommend reading the whole thing, but her conclusion is worth quoting in its entirety:
The issue of e-voting should have been primarily a technological issue—one involving computer security, human factors, reliability, and efficiency. Instead, because of the vast sums of money involved, e-voting has been heavily politicized.
Election officials were told that DREs in the long run would be cheaper than alternative voting systems. They were told that DREs had been extensively tested and that the certification process guaranteed that the machines were reliable and secure. No mention was made of the significant costs of testing and of secure storage of DREs; no mention was made of the inadequacy of the testing and certification processes, to say nothing of the difficulty of creating bug-free software.
Technologists are attempting to educate election officials, policy makers, and the public about the risks of paperless DREs. It is critical for the continued existence of democracy throughout the world that we succeed.