:: extra ::

Where we're headed is pretty clear: electronic voting. For the reasons above, any new voting system raises two big questions:

1) Does the system design make it easier to subvert an election?
The most common complaint we hear these days about electronic voting systems is that don't create a voter-verifiable audit trail. Once you cast your ballot, you just have to trust that the system does the right thing with it. Election officials have to trust these machines too. If they'd like to go back and re-count the votes, there's often nothing to go back and count.

Avi Rubin does a great job of laying out the present-day situation in his book Brave New Ballot. He keeps an up-to-date account of his work as an election judge in Maryland.

Voting systems don't have to be this way. Ron Revest (the "R" in "RSA") has a fascinating proposal for a voting system that allows auditing along with a number of other desirable properties, all without requiring cryptography or any other complex computation. It's called the ThreeBallot voting system.

2) Do shortcomings in the implementation of the system make it easy to take advantage of weaknesses in the design?
It doesn't matter how good the design is, if the implementation is weak, the system can be compromised. But if the design is less than perfect, it puts additional strain on the implementation; bugs or coding oversights can cause a lot of trouble. In 2003, a group of researchers got their hands on some voting machine source code that Diebold accidentally leaked onto the Internet. They found lots to be worried about from both a design and implementation point of view. A study commissioned by the State of California in 2005 found serious bugs too (Disclaimer #1: the auditors used Fortify Source Code Analysis for part of their work.)

All of these bugs led one researcher to wonder what would happen if a voting machine maker was actually *trying* to manipulate votes. The result was a competition based loosely on the Obfuscated C Contest.

This year, Ed Felton's lab found that electronic voting machines have more than just software problems. At least one model can be opened with a hotel minibar key.

Before you get the idea that electrons and voting just don't mix, there are ways that the digital age can make voting easier, even without going near the ballots. I like what PostX did to help soldiers stationed abroad receive their absentee ballots (Disclaimer #2: I also like the fact that PostX used Fortify to help make sure the system is secure!)