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The U.S. Federal Election Assistance Commission under chairman DeForest Soaries has the unenviable job of recommending standards and procedures for electronic voting in time for use in the 2004 federal election. The commission's freedom of action is obviously time constrained, but, less obviously and more importantly, it's also constrained by available technologies, jurisdictional issues and popular assumptions about what the right technology should look like.
You made some good points in your article, especially with respect to cost and dual use of voting equipment.
I agree that the our election systems are in need of improvement. I founded VoteHere in '96 to explore how technology might bring back the transparency and confidence we once had in our elections. We've made great strides, mostly due to our Chief Scientist, C. Andrew Neff, who has developed technology that detects election problems. This technology can prove, in every election, that (1) the voting machine isn't cheating or making mistakes and (2) provides for a meaningful audit -- even when faced with hackers, corrupt insiders, and software bugs. This technology was discussed in the March 2 New York Times Science section: http://www.votehere.net/press/NYT_Science_3_2_04.pdf (reprint). A demonstration can be found at http://www.votehere.com/downloads.html.
MIT Professor Ron Rivest is teaching cryptography coursework using Neff's protocols for secure electronic voting. As you may know, Professor Rivest is a cryptography pioneer, Turing Award winner, and member of the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project. At the recent Rutgers Conference on Electronic Voting (http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/Voting/slides/rivest.ppt), Professor Rivest said that "schemes such as these (Chaum/Neff) provide an interesting degree of 'end-to-end' security."
On the issue of transparency, being good students of cryptography, we are adamant that security through obscurity is no security at all. We've been extremely open with our technology (see http://www.votehere.net/documentation.htm which was released last September) and released a reference source-code implementation in April.
I also agree that voters currently have no way of knowing whether their votes are counted. But even with paper ballots, they can only know that their vote was RECORDED. If voters are provided a way to verify that their vote was COUNTED as they intended, much of the security concerns will be quelled. Our technology allows voters to verify their votes count without violating their secret ballot.
I recently testified on these ideas to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), NIST, House Government Reform Committee and the California Voting Systems & Procedures Panel regarding e-voting machines. The focus of this testimony is that there is more to this bipolar security debate than, on the one hand, "electronic voting machines are fine as-is" and, on the other, "the only way forward is to go back to paper ballots." Copies of my remarks can be found on my blog at http://votehere.com/blog.html
The call for better security, confidence, and transparency are welcome and I wholeheartedly embrace them. Elections have never been perfect but we should encourage the "pursuit of perfection." To resolve our current election dilemma, we must keep the door open to innovation that will allow us to pursue perfection for the benefit all voters.
-- Jim
Jim Adler
Founder
VoteHere, Inc.
Weblog: http://votehere.com/blog.html
I agree that the our election systems are in need of improvement. I founded VoteHere in '96 to explore how technology might bring back the transparency and confidence we once had in our elections. We've made great strides, mostly due to our Chief Scientist, C. Andrew Neff, who has developed technology that detects election problems. This technology can prove, in every election, that (1) the voting machine isn't cheating or making mistakes and (2) provides for a meaningful audit -- even when faced with hackers, corrupt insiders, and software bugs. This technology was discussed in the March 2 New York Times Science section: http://www.votehere.net/press/NYT_Science_3_2_04.pdf (reprint). A demonstration can be found at http://www.votehere.com/downloads.html.
MIT Professor Ron Rivest is teaching cryptography coursework using Neff's protocols for secure electronic voting. As you may know, Professor Rivest is a cryptography pioneer, Turing Award winner, and member of the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project. At the recent Rutgers Conference on Electronic Voting (http://dimacs.rutgers.edu/Workshops/Voting/slides/rivest.ppt), Professor Rivest said that "schemes such as these (Chaum/Neff) provide an interesting degree of 'end-to-end' security."
On the issue of transparency, being good students of cryptography, we are adamant that security through obscurity is no security at all. We've been extremely open with our technology (see http://www.votehere.net/documentation.htm which was released last September) and released a reference source-code implementation in April.
I also agree that voters currently have no way of knowing whether their votes are counted. But even with paper ballots, they can only know that their vote was RECORDED. If voters are provided a way to verify that their vote was COUNTED as they intended, much of the security concerns will be quelled. Our technology allows voters to verify their votes count without violating their secret ballot.
I recently testified on these ideas to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), NIST, House Government Reform Committee and the California Voting Systems & Procedures Panel regarding e-voting machines. The focus of this testimony is that there is more to this bipolar security debate than, on the one hand, "electronic voting machines are fine as-is" and, on the other, "the only way forward is to go back to paper ballots." Copies of my remarks can be found on my blog at http://votehere.com/blog.html
The call for better security, confidence, and transparency are welcome and I wholeheartedly embrace them. Elections have never been perfect but we should encourage the "pursuit of perfection." To resolve our current election dilemma, we must keep the door open to innovation that will allow us to pursue perfection for the benefit all voters.
-- Jim
Jim Adler
Founder
VoteHere, Inc.
Weblog: http://votehere.com/blog.html
