Voting experience or “I want my VVPAT”
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008I just voted on a Diebold AccuVote-TS (I will call them Diebold machines as long as they have Diebold branding all over them). Everything went very smoothly - I was greeted by friendly and knowledgeable elections workers, the touchscreen was calibrated, my vote was presented to me for review, I mashed on the “Cast Vote” button on the screen, and then… poof. Nothing. I had no tangible evidence that my vote was recorded according to my wishes.
VVPAT is voter verified paper audit trail. It means a piece of paper records your vote choice in parallel with the electronic record. Many experts recommend mandatory VVPAT in conjunction with audits that reconcile the paper with the electronic counts for a statistically meaningful sample of available data. I don’t know about the Maryland audit procedures, but since there’s no VVPAT, there’s nothing to audit.
In an earlier post I discuss security requirements for a voting system. Let’s just review how well they were met today.