EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Barbara Quigley
Organization : | US Citizen
Post Date : | 9/30/2005
Section Comments
Section : | A1D
Page no. : |
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Comment : | Appendix D regarding "Independent Dual Verification" contains logic errors. As an example, if people are trying to ensure the accuracy of vote counts by auditing, then people need to have records to audit that are independent of insiders within the system, not records that are independent of each other. In banking and financial industries, audits are done independently of insiders within the system to detect errors that could be innocently or maliciously introduced by insiders. The reason independent auditors are used are numerous not least of which is independence avoids vested interest, or the appearance of vested interest, so others have confidence in the system. Voting systems should provide the same protections. In fact voting systems should be held to a higher standard than banking systems. The payoff for vote tampering is larger than for embezzling funds from financial institutions because elected officials control budgets from the millions at the county level to the trillions at the national level. So the Independent Dual Verification (IDV) measures proposed in Appendix D, while good for system reliability or redundancy, are absolutely inadequate to protect our voting systems from insider errors or embezzlement because the IDV audit methods proposed are most often not independent of insiders within the voting systems. There were other logic errors in the analysis of "Independent Dual Verification Systems" as well. To claim that IDV systems as described in Appendix D would ensure the accuracy of vote counts, is incorrect and illogical. Thank you.