The Top-To-Bottom Review of California Voting Systems
12Google Tech Talks
December, 11 2007
In elections employing electronic voting machines, we have observed
that poor procedures, equipment failures, and honest mistakes pose a
real threat to the accuracy of the final tally. The event logs kept by
these machines can give auditors clues as to the causes of anomalies
and inconsistencies; however, each voting machine is trusted to keep
its own audit and ballot data, making the record unreliable. If a
machine is damaged, accidentally erased, or otherwise compromised
during the election, we have no way to detect tampering or loss of
auditing records and cast votes.
This talk begins with our experiences in real elections where we have
observed these issues in the field, including a disputed primary
election in Laredo, Texas as well as the recent Congressional election
in Sarasota, Florida. These issues motivate a new design for a voting
architecture we call "VoteBox" which networks the voting machines in a
polling place, allowing for replicated, timeline-entangled logs which
can survive malice and malfunction to provide a verifiable audit of
election-day events.
Speaker: Dan Wallach
Dan Wallach is an associate professor in the Department of Computer
Science at Rice University in Houston, Texas and is the associate
director of NSF's ACCURATE (A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable,
Auditable and Transparent Elections). His research involves computer
security and the issues of building secure and robust software systems
for the Internet. He has testified about voting security issues
before government bodies in the U.S., Mexico, and the European Union,
has served as an expert witness in a number of voting technology
lawsuits, and recently participated in California's "top-to-bottom"
audit of its voting systems.