[EM] Electronic Voting Bill of Rights?

[Anthony Duff]

 --- Ernest Prabhakar <drernie at mac.com> wrote:
> 
> REQUIREMENTS FOR ELECTRONIC VOTING SYSTEMS (EVSs)
> 

> 3.  MUST allow me to verify that my vote was entered and counted 
> correctly

No.  This is bad.  If you can verify your vote (after leaving the polling place) you
can sell your vote.

If you have a print out of you vote that you leave, secure, in the polling place, then
the next day election officials and scutineers can verify that, for each separate
polling place, every vote recorded by the computer corresponds to a paper vote stored
in the boxes.  Why is this not good enough?  It is sufficient to prove that the
computer
has not fiddled the data.
> 
> 4.  MUST NOT allow other people to verify that I voted a particular way

Agreed.  This requires that the machine doesn't know who you are, because you cannot
prove after the event that the computer didn't do certain things such as transmit your
name and vote elsewhere.


My starting position is that anything to do with a computer is not to be trusted.  The
ways to undermine a computer system seem almost endless.  The code may be faulty.  The
code being run may not be the code that you thought it was.  The data may be altered
without trace.  The non-rewritable dvd may be substituted.  

Backup paper ballots, that have been secured under continuous supervision by anyone who
wants to watch, are the only way to demonstrate that the vote count was true.

Anthony

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