ACM Digital Library

www.acm.org/dl

The Ultimate Online
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Resource!

officials must recognize that improving voting systems is not a short-term project. Most of the substantive improvements in voting systems will likely not come from short-term patches, but through long-term technical innovation. In particular, cryptography and E2E voting systems offer potential for revolutionizing voting. Yet mandating paper audit trails could preclude any chance of implementing these systems in the near future. Rather than turn back the clock on voting technology, we should develop policies that encourage innovation in our voting systems. To begin, federal funding needs to be available to sponsor voting system research and development, pilot testing, and risk assessment evaluations.

In addition, voting system guidelines should define functional standards (such as requiring independent, voter-verifiable audit trails), rather than technologically restrictive design standards (such as paper audit trails). Functional standards define the minimum operational requirements to which a system must conform. Since functional standards do not define any specific technology or process, they are flexible enough to allow researchers to develop new approaches to solve existing problems. Just as government should not require that all computers run Windows, neither should it require that all voting machines use paper.

Policymakers cannot disregard voting system technology, and computer scientists cannot ignore the public

policy implications of their recommendations. The real challenge is not to design the perfect voting machine, but to design the perfect election. This question is neither exclusively in the domain of computer science nor exclusively in the domain of public policy. Instead, experts from many fields must work together to develop a solution that satisfies all of the characteristics of a good election. While quick-fix ideas may sound good on paper, a deeper analysis shows that many of these proposals suffer serious faults. Moreover, paper trails are not a short-term solution to security, as they only address a small portion of a larger problem. Reinforcing the front door of a house is pointless if the back door is wide open. Instead of trying to apply an unproven and expensive paper patch to existing voting systems, security experts and policymakers should lay out a strategy to advance voting system technology based on a reasoned analysis and solid evidence.

 

References

1. Adida, B. and Rivest, R.L. Scratch & vote: Self-contained paper-based cryptographic voting. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM Workshop on Privacy in Electronic Society (WPES’06) (Alexandria, VA, Oct. 30, 2006), ACM, NY, 29–40.

2. Norden, L. et al. The Machinery of Democracy: Voting System Security, Accessibility, Usability, and Cost. Technical report, Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, October 2006.

3. The National Institute of Standards and Technology. Developing an Analysis of Threats to Voting Systems; vote.nist.gov/threats/.

 

Daniel Castro ( dcastro@itif.org) is a senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation ( www.itif.org) a non-profit, non-partisan public policy organization in Washington, D.C.

To join ACM and/or subscribe to the Digital Library, contact ACM:

Phone: 1.800.342.6626 (U.S. & Canada) + 1.212.626.0500 (Global)

Fax: + 1.212.944.1318

Hours: 8: 30 a.m.– 4: 30 p.m., EST

Email: acmhelp@acm.org

Join URL: www.acm.org/joinacm

Mail: ACM Member Services General Post O ce

PO Box 30777

New York, NY 10087-0777 USA

Rebuttal: David L. Dill

I HAVE ARGuED that the U.S. voting system is in crisis due to the ill-advised adoption of inherently flawed DRE ( direct-recording electronic) voting machines, which are opaque and highly insecure against attacks by both insiders and outsiders. Fortunately, this problem can be easily solved by using voter-marked ballots and precinct-count optical scan technology (PCOS), which is already in widespread use and has proven to be reliable and cost-effective. In particular, I do not argue

for adding printers to DREs—PCOS is the best option for voter verification of ballots.

Daniel Castro says a paper trail will not solve all problems in voting. That’s true, and no surprise to advocates of paper ballots. Paper ballots are an essential ingredient in a trustworthy election system, which must also include rigorous physical security of ballots, manual counts to audit election results, and other procedural and legal safeguards. But trustworthy elections are impossible with current paperless DREs. The manufacturers and programmers of