[IP] more on He Pushed the Hot Button of Touch-Screen Voting
Begin forwarded message:
From: L Jean Camp <jean_camp@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: June 15, 2004 12:30:15 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] He Pushed the Hot Button of Touch-Screen Voting
Here are the best practices from the workshop mentioned in the report.
they follow as text but are available as pdf.
Harvard Voting, Vote Capture & Vote Counting Symposium
Best Practices
The following is a set of best practices developed at the Harvard Vote,
Vote Capture and Vote Counting Symposium. These best practices are
offered by the organizers of that event for citizens, technologists,
and the election officials who endeavor to serve them. This set of best
practices is written as a consensus document. Although not every
attendee will agree with every best practice, the organizers believe
that these recommendations fairly reflect the overall conclusions.
Certain immediate steps must be taken.
o Election Assistance Commission and National Institute of Standards
and Technology open standards must be developed and implemented.
o It is the civic responsibility of voting experts and technologists to
aid in any voting process chosen, designing guides, working in polls,
and gathering trustworthy data.
The process is even more important than the underlying technology.
o The educational process for given technologies must follow a “chain
of trust” where the election workers trust their trainers and are
trusted by the public.
o Poll workers should be well chosen from a motivated pool with
incentives, and monetary incentives have proven to work. Poll workers
are more important than the technology.
o Poll workers should be well trained to fully understand the
technology and how to handle contingencies.
o Poll workers should not have to rely solely on the vendors to address
observed errors.
o Speed and accuracy in the process are both achievable, but not
simultaneously possible. The public should be educated about the
distinction between the speed that allows immediate returns, and the
accuracy required in the official tally.
o There should be adequate time for determining the official tally.
o There should be provisional voting mechanisms, and adequate time to
evaluate provisional votes for the final tally.
A hybrid of paper and electronic systems provides the most effective
voting system.
o Electronic interfaces can meet the widest range of accessibility
needs.
o Electronic interfaces enable customized ballots by zip code, party,
or disability.
o Voter examination of a paper ballot allows the greatest degree of
confidence that the ballot was cast as intended.
o A paper ballot, when handled properly, allows a robust audit trail
for a recount to ensure that the ballot was counted as cast.
o Hybrid systems can be designed to accommodate provisional
arrangements and contingencies for equipment failure. There are many
possible implementations.
Good voting systems require good design standards.
o There is no single voting interface that can meet everyone’s needs.
o An untrained voter should be able to know when voting equipment fails.
o Access is critical: not to a specific, single technology, but to the
ability to vote in a fashion that provides full civil rights.
o Rigorous testing is needed for all voting system components for
security, reliability and usability.
o Even with full auditing of each vote, testing to ensure usability and
reliability remain critical.
Openness of a voting process is critical for the perception of
legitimacy of that process.
o All security issues should be fully disclosed, although allowing
vendors a limited, fixed time between notification and public
disclosure could foster more public trust.
o If underlying mechanics or software are not in the public domain,
they must at least be available for inspection by the larger security
research community.
o The voting technology acquisition process should be open for public
scrutiny from constituents.
o The voting technology acquisition process should be open to allow
jurisdictions to learn from each other; to be specific, records of
difficulties should be made available to all election officials.
Election systems must have built-in auditing capabilities.
o The reconciliation procedure must be clear, precise, authoritative,
and binding.
o The cast ballot must follow a “Chain of Custody” from the moment it
is cast to the moment the vote is entered into the final official
tally. This chain must be subject to audit and oversight at each step
regardless of technology.
o If some metric of voting irregularity is exceeded in a given
jurisdiction, a court-supervised manual recount should be required.
o Auditing should not be implemented by a vendor affiliated with the
original system.
The general approach to building and implementing elections processes
must carefully targeted.
o Policymakers should first focus on the overall election process
before selecting a specific technology. However, process details must
then be tailored to meet the requirements of each specific technology.
Technology neutral policies are inadequate in elections.
o Policy makers must specify desirable priorities before designing an
election system and its technologies. They must identify the problems
they wish to solve and how each proposed solution will solve them.
o There is an inevitable trade-off between authentication of voters and
access. Requiring greater proof of the right to vote will prevent some
from voting; removing any requirement for proof will allow those
without the right to vote to cast ballot.
o Elections and the surrounding systems should be explicitly designed
to handle crises. Policy makers and elections officials should assume
in every case that there will be a contested recount and plan
accordingly.
o Given that no voting system can ever be perfect it is crucial to
incorporate risk management tools into the design and evaluation of
voting systems and implementation strategies.
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