Page 114 - Towards Trustworthy Elections New Directions in Electronic Voting by Ed Gerck (auth.), David Chaum, Markus Jakobsson, Ronald L. Rivest, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Josh Benaloh, Miroslaw Kutylowski, Ben Adida ( (z-lib.org (1)
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S. Bruck, D. Jefferson, and R.L. Rivest
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correctly recorded) it is not software-independent. The authors now support the
proposal that voting systems should be software-independent.
The use of barcodes as suggested at one point in the present paper is prob-
lematic; if no barcodes are used then a paper ballot is directly verifiable by the
voter (and the system is software-independent); otherwise the ballot is only in-
directly verifiable, since a device is needed to read the barcodes (and the system
is not software-independent). Barcodes may not be worth the extra complexity
and potential security vulnerabilities.
There has been some interesting work on the problem of developing a very
small code base for a voting system. Most notable is that of Ka-Ping Yee and
colleagues [6,5], who propose using a small Python program driving a user-
interface with pre-rendered graphics. Their system does both vote capture and
vote casting.
References
1. OASIS. Election markup language (EML) v5.0 (2007),
http://www.oasis-open.org/specs/index.php#eml5.0
2. CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project. Voting: What is, what could be. Technical
report (July 2001), http://www.vote.caltech.edu/2001report.htm
3. Rivest, R.L., Wack, J.P.: On the notion of “software independence” in voting sys-
tems, July 28 (2006), http://vote.nist.gov/SI-in-voting.pdf
4. TDC. Voluntary voting system guidelines, http://www.eac.gov/vvsg
5. Yee, K.-P.: Building Reliable Voting Machine Software. PhD thesis, U.C. Berkeley
EECS Dept. (2007); Technical Report 2007-167,
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2007/EECS-2007-167.html
6. Yee, K.-P., Wagner, D., Hearst, M., Bellovin, S.: Prerendered user interfaces for
high-assurance electronic voting. In: USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Tech-
nology Workshop (2006),
http://zesty.ca/pubs/yee-wagner-hearst-bellovin-prui-usenix2006.pdf

