EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | David Webber
Organization : | OASIS Election Markup Language (EML) TC
Post Date : | 9/6/2005
General Comments
Comment : | Public Comment on VVSG1 draft June. 05 To the Commission: Some vendors appear to be taking steps to integrate their voting solutions with voter registration systems. Whatever the intentions and motivations to this there are some fundamental principles being broken here that need to be clarified and protected by the VVSG. 1) There has to be a complete physical separation between the voter registration system and the voting system. No direct realtime electronic connection can be permitted, nor can the voting system know in anyway who voters are, nor store lists of voters. 2) The only connection between the two systems is the voter themselves and the physical act of voting. That is the principle we need to establish in the VVSG. 3) So when a voter is acknowledged in the registration system and is provided access to the voting system, they carry a physical access token of some kind that denotes their entitlement to vote. Their voting event then corresponds to the event in the registration system. 4) Because voting is private this process has to be anonymous and a voting system can have no knowledge of voters demographic information of any kind, even and especially including total numbers of voters registered or other metrics. I believe these priniciples need to be enshrined in the architecture requirements for EAC VVSG based systems.