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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.
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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
