[EM] Re: touch screen voting machines

[Ken Johnson]

election-methods-electorama.com-request at electorama.com wrote:

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>We tested this known as "Ticketting" in Belgium and there is a 
>theoretical Denial of Service attack on the election process. If a set 
>of voter complain that the ticket (or the screen or both) does not 
>display what they wanted to vote for. Since there is no way to know what 
>they wanted to vote... we have a problem. Since it could be true... 
>maybe election should be stopped!
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>To deal with this, in Belgium by law, if the printed vote is not what 
>you like, you call the president of the voting burreau and you vote 
>again in front of him. And sorry for the secrecy of your vote. He will 
>click on "OK vote match" for you. ;-)
>
Another possible approach - The voting machine should query the user to 
verify that the displayed and printed results are correct, and press 
"Accept" BEFORE the result is posted. If the user rejects the vote, the 
machine gives them a cancellation receipt as evidence that their vote 
has not yet been entered in the system.

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>It is easy for the computer to always show the right answer when asked 
>while keeping the election result altered.
>As long as not all the vote (or a majority of them) have been verified, 
>it is possible to trick the one that try to verify.
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>Partial recount are useless... How do you know the computer was not just 
>showing what you wanted to see?
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The computer doesn't need to know what you want to see. Rather than 
querying the computer to validate a specific vote, you just download the 
entire vote database, sorted by vote serialization ID, and inspect it 
directly.

>David GLAUDE
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>Message: 5
>From: Ernest Prabhakar <drernie at mac.com>
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>REQUIREMENTS FOR ELECTRONIC VOTING SYSTEMS (EVSs)
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>1.  MUST enable potential recounts
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Why is that a necessity? If the election result is invalidated, just 
hold another election. Computerization, combined with robust 
verification means, should make voting processes and software as 
efficient and reliable as commercial financial systems, so this should 
be an exceptionally rare occurence.

Ken Johnson