While the US Government has been tasked through HAVA to spend $B+s of dollars helping states acquiring voting systems to "focus on assuring Americans that their vote was being recorded" there has been too little focus on the key issue of "how do you trust and know that your voting is being counted?" Clearly with the paper-based mechanical voting systems this had become an issue - but are we any further forward today? What exactly is trust in the context of casting an election ballot?
What we do know is that since democracy was invented - people have sought to influence the result of a vote. Some of this is judged fair and some of this as cheating - example : I can say that bad things will happen if you vote for 'X'; but I cannot say I will do bad things to you if you vote for 'X'!
Giving people confidence that their vote was accurately recorded and counted is but one piece of the overall picture. Allied to that is that other people were not able to somehow make votes and change the count so as to negate the legitimate ballots cast!
Most importantly people should be able to transparently understand how the computer is handling their vote and have the means to independently verify that and hence be confident in and embrace the process. Unfortunately today that does not appear to be the case - and the report produced by
Forbes on the flaws in current e-Voting systems highlights that.
The report notes "The most widely used electronic-voting systems all have flaws that can be addressed relatively easily, but few states and counties have actually implemented recommended security measures, researchers concluded Tuesday". The report, based on interviews with elections officials and analyses of voting systems, came from the Task Force on Voting System Security convened by New York University's Brennan Center for Justice.
So there are legitimate ways of influencing elections that we all are familiar with - and then there are ways that clearly seek to undermine a fair and open process.
Our goal with developing trusted balloting mechanisms is to reduce the risk that people will use the computer technology introduced into the process to cheat in new and interesting ways that were previously not available.
Also - computer technology should remove old ways of cheating - such as ballot stuffing - and therefore minimize the risks that were previously there.
Other challenges that the report notes are addressed in the trusted logic approach - notably - "Researchers acknowledged that audits won't uncover attacks that change both the electronic and paper records, something possible because many voters don't bother to check the paper trail before leaving the voting booth" - because in the TLV approach the voter has to physically use the paper record to make the ballot themselves - in contrast to the computer printing out its own paper record behind a screen away from the voter.
Larry Norden, the task force's chairman noted - "We're not talking about dramatic restructuring of the architecture," but "We're talking about straightforward things, most of which could be in place for the 2006 elections."
While Larry is undoubtedly correct - we have seen that the vendors of the voting systems have been extremely reluctant to do so - and demanded excessive fees and re-tooling costs in order to provide these changes - as is happening right now in Maryland for example.
Until these fundamental issues have been addressed and voting systems that truely provide trusted mechanisms from the core of their operational approach - then we will continue to fail to deliver on this fundamental foundation for the future of democracy.
Voters do care - and instinctively can understand this when presented this in a clear fashion. The problem is today that very few understand their own crucial role in ensuring that computer systems really are counting their vote correctly because they are being deliberately excluded from the fundamentals of the voting process itself and relegated to a spectator role.