Page 133 - 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)

Electronic Elections: A Balancing Act
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the technical non-savvy. In the U.S., where local political subdivisions have signifi-
cant autonomy in how they run elections, the debate started in the mid 70’s, picked up
some visibility in the 80’s, and gained global headlines with the 2000 Florida results.
In Brazil, where federal law defines election processes uniformly, the debate gained
3
equivalent attention twice, though each time only briefly, in 1982 and 2001 .
Many computer security experts from the U.S. and Europe participate in the U.S.
debate. In Brazil, in spite of the pioneering and uniquely universal use of DREs, in-
volvement of experts in the debate has been quite limited. In either case, however,
those in charge of running elections also have a point to make, mostly divergent from
the experts'.
2 The Puzzle of Election Security
Officials responsible for organizing and running elections have been, for instance,
largely against audit measures based on voter-viewable printouts. Some have been
quite vocal about it, as in Brazil, presumably because of the inconvenience such
4
measures might impose on their work . But surely also because, although few
would publicly admit it, eventual discrepancies between electronic and equivalent
manual tallies would allow discovery of casual ineptitude, or even possible bad
faith, in the discharge of their official duties. On the other hand, such audit capabil-
ity would also diminish whatever bully power, explicit or implicit, such officials
might wield (or intermediate) among elected politicians and aspiring candidates or
their political parties.
However, most independent information technology experts who have written on
5
the subject have tended to favor the requirement that each electronic voting machine
be set to print a record of each vote, with the printed record visually checkable by the
voter. The reasons for this opinion, explored more fully below, include anchoring

3
In 1982, with the ProConsult case (previous footnote), and in 2001, with the "Senate's panel
scandal”, briefly covered ahead. [for a thorough account of the latter, see ref. 2].
4
Several electoral officials in Brazil, including judges, have publicly opined that this kind of
audit measure constitutes “retrocession.” [see ref. 2].
5
Aviel Rubin, http://avi-rubin.blogspot.com/; Bruce Schneier,
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html;
Douglas Jones, http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/cbc2004supp.shtml;
Dan Wallach, http://avirubin.com/vote/analysis/index.html;
David Chaum, http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/voting/papers/
CryptoBytes_Fall2004.pdf
David Dill. http://securingamerica.com/ccn/node/8023g;
Ed Felten, http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/audit07full.pdf;Michael
Waldman (Editor of the “Brennan Report”), http://www.brennancenter.org/
presscenter/releases_2006/pressrelease_2006_0627.html;
Rebecca Mercuri, http://www.notablesoftware.com/evote.html;
Ron Rivest, http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/
Rivest-TheThreeBallotVotingSystem.pdf
Roy Saltman, http://www.votefraud.org/saltman_roy_1988_report.htm;
Robert Strunk, http://www.votefraud.org/expert_strunk_report.htm