EML auditing refs: Software Independence; Principles; examples

[Neal McBurnett <nealmcb@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 03:35:40PM +0100, John Borras wrote:
> ....
> Assuming everyone is happy with this approach I?m attaching the following to
> start the discussions:
> 
> -          An extract from our V6 Spec document of those bits relating to how
> we have covered auditing to date;
> 
> -          The submissions made by Neal in the last Public Review that we held
> over to this stage;
> 
> -          An extract from the Council of Europe Recommendation on e-voting
> standards covering Audit.
> 
> Please throw into the pot anything else you know relating to election audit
> standards.

John, thanks for getting this started and for the links.

Here are some of the key documents in the US election auditing
community:

This paper is basically about the need to avoid relying on software
for elections:

 On the notion of "software independence" in voting systems
  Ronald L. Rivest, John P. Wack; Draft July 28, 2006
  http://vote.nist.gov/SI-in-voting.pdf

  There is a published version also but it seems to cost money unless
  you have the right journal access:

   http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/366/1881/3759.abstract

This is the current state-of-the art for getting software-independent
assessments of election outcomes based on hand counts of the voter
verified paper records:

 Principles and Best Practices for Post-Election Audits
 http://electionaudits.org/principles/

The post-election vote interpretation and tabulation audits described
in the Principles document are the ones that I think we should focus
on for EML v6.1.

For examples of the reporting of the information needed for an audit,
see these two sites, which use different auditing software and present
the data in different ways:

My ElectionAudits software generates the information as html tables:
 http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/elections/boulder-audit-08-11/

An excel-based calculation and display is here:
 http://www.bouldercounty.org/clerk/elections/2010PrimaryAudit.htm

Finally, for completeness, here is the link I sent earlier to my
preliminary EML 510 example for auditing:

 http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/electionaudits/eml510-example.xml

Neal McBurnett                 http://neal.mcburnett.org/