Trusted Logic Voting (TLV)

Some vendors appear to be taking steps to integrate their voting solutions with voter registration systems. This was almost an inevitable development after the Carter/Baker Commission focused attention on the flaws in voter registration process today. So of course everyone is stepping forward now with their "but we can fix that!" offerings, including the use of server systems connected to the polling stations.

Whatever the intentions and motivations to this there are some fundamental principles being broken here that need to be clarified and protected by at minimum the EAC VVSG requirements and architecture, and probably beyond that to legal clarifications in voting law.

These can be summarized as:

1. There has to be a complete physical separation between the voter registration system and the voting system. No direct realtime electronic connection can be permitted, nor can the voting system know in anyway who voters are, nor store lists of voters.



2. The only connection between the two systems is the voter themselves and the physical act of voting. That is a fundamental principle here that needs to be a requirement of voting system architectures.



3. So when a voter is acknowledged in the registration system and is provided access to the voting system, they carry a physical access token of some kind that denotes their entitlement to vote. Their voting event then corresponds to the event in the registration system.



4. Because voting is private this process has to be anonymous and a voting system can have no knowledge of voters demographic information of any kind, even and especially including total numbers of voters registered or other metrics.



5. Use of cast paper ballot audit trail to verify the total number of electronic votes counted is still essential. Even more so, in a centralized server based tabulation system.

Centralized server systems introduced into the voting process, while it potentially solves some issues, introduces many more concerns around vote tabulation and declaration of result totals.