RE: [election-services] Open letter in response to electronic votingarticles in the October Communications of the ACM journal (Volume 51 No.1010/08)

["David RR Webber \(XML\)" <david@drrw.info>]

Richard,

 

Appreciate the support and validation.

 

It is very difficult for others to visualize the complete value set - I'm seeing folks refer to OASIS EML as "just markup - and you can use any for that". 

 

Clearly we have work to do in educating on the core values that EML delivers - and its not just markup - and no - all markup is not created equally.  Choose your markup carefully!

 

I concur on your points regarding the process and the support the EML provides for implementing that in a rigorous way that can provide the key verification and transparency needed.  And yes - the support for engineering best practices are also vital.

 

We can definately start with these as basis for our "10 Key Reasons to use EML" - perhaps in a broadsheet format like this (10 key points: http://www.niem.gov/pdf/10KeyPoints.pdf).

 

I agree vis the challenges with paper - however it has been with us for 2,000 years now - and there's a ton of support infrastructure around it!  Plus those printers and scanners keep getting better for less $$ cost.

 

The resolution procedures are clearly something you can provide a "cookbook" for.  Don't assume you have to call the FBI/Police immediately - here are some basic things to check first!  Similarly - once you know you have 3 sets of records - there is much the software crosschecking can do - to ensure the right datasets are being compared and that the right actions were performed by the election staff.

 

Thanks, DW

 

 

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [election-services] Open letter in response to electronic
voting articles in the October Communications of the ACM journal (Volume
51 No.10 10/08)
From: Richard J Cardone <richcar@us.ibm.com>
Date: Tue, October 14, 2008 3:09 pm
To: EML TC <election-services@lists.oasis-open.org>


Here, here, David!

Your response to the Communications article is engaging, provocative, and brings up points that are seldom raised in polite company.  The recently developed cryptographic schemes that target end-to-end (E2E) verifiability are interesting and important research avenues, but I agree they won't provide a practical alternative to today's systems anytime soon.  The public needs to believe that its voting system is accurate, secure, and reliable; and verifiability is an important characteristic in building confidence in a system.  E2E verifiability, however, while being mathematically elegant, won't necessarily convince the general public that a voting system is fair because it's logic is not obvious or transparent--and what the public thinks matters.  Open source and open standards bring transparency into the existing legal, social, and logistical electoral frameworks by focusing on how systems are engineered.

I do not agree, however, that "an underpinning that is founded on paper..." is the only or even the best way to achieve verifiable election results that can be trusted by the general public.  That said, the system that you describe has many nice features and improves the current state of the art.  The ballot marking component is software independent, and that certainly relieves us of the problem of proving some of the software correct.  The other technologies that are part of the system, like optical scan and EML, are established and workable.  The voting experience would be similar to what many people are used to, so public resistance should not be problem.  

On the other hand, the proposed system does face certain challenges.  First, the optical scan component has the same strengths and weaknesses of existing optical scan systems, including the problem of software corruption.  Also, by having 3 distinct records of a vote, a well-defined reconciliation process is necessary to resolve discrepancies when the records do not agree with each other.  Unfortunately, reconciliation processes are often legally mandated with an emphasis on quick resolution rather than correctness.  On a practical note, in every election I've worked, temporary printer failure was the cause of significant inconvenience.  The logistics and cost of dealing with printers and paper needs to be weighed against paperless approaches, despite the current movement back to paper.            

Rich