Monday, August 28, 2006
Independent Verification: Essential Action to Assure Integrity in the Voting Process
The latest paper from Roy G. Saltman and funded by a grant from NIST provides an excellent round-up of election process and technology in America.
Roy confirms what the voting advocacy community already knew - but does so in an authoritative and clearly reasoned way.
Also - he details some of the in-place balances and checks - that often sound so reasonable and sound - for example Maryland has a way to check that the certified software is installed on their voting systems that is crossed checked by NIST. Unfortunately this check woefully fails to verify if that explicit version of the software is actually running on voting machines during the ballot casting itself! Subtle details - but of course vital to integrity of elections.
Anyway - there is much instructive information in this latest paper - and certainly an excellent introduction for those seeking an overview also of digital voting and the election process in America.
You can also compare this latest paper with the one originally published back in October 1988 for the ACM.
Roy confirms what the voting advocacy community already knew - but does so in an authoritative and clearly reasoned way.
Also - he details some of the in-place balances and checks - that often sound so reasonable and sound - for example Maryland has a way to check that the certified software is installed on their voting systems that is crossed checked by NIST. Unfortunately this check woefully fails to verify if that explicit version of the software is actually running on voting machines during the ballot casting itself! Subtle details - but of course vital to integrity of elections.
Anyway - there is much instructive information in this latest paper - and certainly an excellent introduction for those seeking an overview also of digital voting and the election process in America.
You can also compare this latest paper with the one originally published back in October 1988 for the ACM.
# posted by DRRW @ 9:55 AM 
