EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | jeff spakowski
Organization : | none
Post Date : | 9/30/2005
Section Comments
Section : | A1D
Page no. : |
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Comment : | The form was a little hard to use..had but I had to use Section "1" because the form did not permit Appendix D or D-1 to be used as sections. Please forward them to the right authors. Appendix D regarding "Independent Dual Verification" contains logic errors. For one example, if one is trying to ensure the accuracy of vote counts by auditing, then one needs 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 in order to detect errors that could be innocently or maliciously introduced by insiders. Voting systems should provide the same protections. 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 wholly 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. thank you jeff spakowski