EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | N/A
Organization : | N/A
Post Date : | 9/30/2005
Section Comments
Section : | 6
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Comment : | Live auditing techniques can be used to verify the accuracy of the cast vote record tabulation process during the live election. The following proposed addition to the VVSG describes one method for doing so. 6.10 Requirements for Live Auditing of Vote Tabulation The vote tabulation process, as defined in this section, takes as its input a set of cast vote records and possibly some election metadata, and generates as its output a set of vote totals. Some modern voting systems decouple this process from other election processes, allowing it to be independently live audited. To live audit the tabulation process, the cast vote records used as input to the vote tabulation system are also tabulated using a second computer system (the "audit tabulation system"), using different tabulation software that is open-source and publicly distributed. Any difference between the primary tabulation system and the audit tabulation system results is an indication of error or fraud. 6.10.1 The vote tabulation function should be decoupled from other voting system functions to facilitate auditing. 6.10.2 The audit tabulation system shall use the same cast vote record format as the primary tabulation system. 6.10.3 Voting system components which store or export cast vote records (such as vote interpretation components) shall have no means of determining whether the stored cast vote records are intended for primary tabulation or audit tabulation. 6.10.4 The audit tabulation system software shall be independently written from the primary tabulation system software using a=20 "clean room" methodology. =20 6.10.5 The audit tabulation system software source code shall be publicly distributed to facilitate peer review. 6.10.6 The audit tabulation system shall reside on a separate computer system than the primary tabulation system.