Electronic Voting Literature Review
David Friedman Charles Wright Dan Kalowsky John Daniel
Electronic Voting Literature Review
Computer scientists who have done work in, or are interested in, electronic voting all seem to agree on two things: Internet voting does not meet the requirements for public elections Currently widely-deployed voting systems need improvement Voting on the Internet using everyday PC's offers only weak security, but its main disadvantages are in the areas of anonymity and protection against coercion and/or vote selling. It's such a truly bad idea that there seems to be no credible academic effort to deploy it at all. The Presidential elections of 2000 brought national attention to problems with current American methods of casting and counting votes in public elections. Most people believe that the current system should be changed; there is much disagreement on how such changes should be made. The MIT/Caltech researchers [1] “see a promising future for electronic voting, despite its problems today” (under a few conditions). They advocate using the methods currently in use which result in the lowest average numbers of “uncounted, unmarked, and spoiled ballots,” like in-precinct optical scanning. Their report even proposes a framework for a new voting system with a decentralized, modular design. Other researchers have done work in electronic voting; while they may not explicitly mention voting from remote poll sites, their work is nonetheless relevant to any effort at designing or implementing a remote poll site voting system. Lorrie Cranor [2] could be classified, like the Caltech/MIT researchers, as a cautious optimist. She acknowledges the problems inherent in each kind of voting apparatus, but doesn't make an overt recommendation on her site for one technology over the rest. Some other academics, whom we did not study in class, like Peter Neumann who moderates the RISKS mailing list, are less optimistic. They agree mostly with the Caltech/MIT committee, but their papers
Electronic Voting Literature Review
Computer scientists who have done work in, or are interested in, electronic voting all seem to agree on two things: Internet voting does not meet the requirements for public elections Currently widely-deployed voting systems need improvement Voting on the Internet using everyday PC's offers only weak security, but its main disadvantages are in the areas of anonymity and protection against coercion and/or vote selling. It's such a truly bad idea that there seems to be no credible academic effort to deploy it at all. The Presidential elections of 2000 brought national attention to problems with current American methods of casting and counting votes in public elections. Most people believe that the current system should be changed; there is much disagreement on how such changes should be made. The MIT/Caltech researchers [1] “see a promising future for electronic voting, despite its problems today” (under a few conditions). They advocate using the methods currently in use which result in the lowest average numbers of “uncounted, unmarked, and spoiled ballots,” like in-precinct optical scanning. Their report even proposes a framework for a new voting system with a decentralized, modular design. Other researchers have done work in electronic voting; while they may not explicitly mention voting from remote poll sites, their work is nonetheless relevant to any effort at designing or implementing a remote poll site voting system. Lorrie Cranor [2] could be classified, like the Caltech/MIT researchers, as a cautious optimist. She acknowledges the problems inherent in each kind of voting apparatus, but doesn't make an overt recommendation on her site for one technology over the rest. Some other academics, whom we did not study in class, like Peter Neumann who moderates the RISKS mailing list, are less optimistic. They agree mostly with the Caltech/MIT committee, but their papers