Google Tech Talk: "Adventures in E-Voting" (Video)
Speaker: Dan Wallach (Rice), ACCURATE Associate Director
Where: Google, Inc. (Google Tech Talk)
Date: December 11, 2007
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEI9Wn_hPWE
Summary: 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. The talk concludes with a discussion of the findings from the California Secretary of State’s “Top-to-Bottom” Review (TTBR) of voting systems, which we participated in.
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.
