EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Jordi Puiggali
Organization : | Scytl Secure Electronic Voting
Post Date : | 9/9/2005
General Comments
Comment : | Conclusions The presence of DREs in polling places in the United States has increased considerably because of the many advantages that they offer over other voting systems in terms of usability, flexibility and accessibility. The complexity of DREs makes the audit and certification process by election authorities difficult and unreliable. As a result, legislators and election authorities are currently looking for solutions to provide voter-verifiability to DREs in order to increase public’s confidence in DRE voting. Although printers are probably the best-known voter-verifiability solution, there are other alternative solutions that present advantages over printers in terms of security, usability and implementability. This article introduces a list of 13 comparative factors that can be used to evaluate and rate the different voter-verifiability solutions. This article also describes the basic concept underlying a new voter-verifiability solution developed by Scytl Secure Electronic Voting. This solution is based on a Verification Module that allows voters to verify and confirm their voting options in a simple and audited device independent from the DRE. This innovative solution (i) provides assurance that the votes are cast and recorded as intended, (ii) simplifies the audit and certification processes since the auditing efforts need to focus only on a simple and easy-to-audit device, (iii) protects the integrity and anonymity of every single vote once this has been verified by the voter, (iv) provides redundancy through a double register of the votes, and (v) allows independent parallel vote recounts.