Voting Security (was: The Next Genaration)

[Eric Rescorla <[e-mail]>]

[Changing the subject line because this is a change of topic.]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 8:37 AM <[e-mail]> wrote:

> IMHO, if the interest is in protecting the democratic process, the first
> place we should look is the digital voting infrastructure, as that is the
> vector most abused.  Knowing what I do about network and computer security
> in general, I have come to the conclusion that hand counted paper ballots
> with a strong chain of custody are the only way to ensure a free and fair
> election.
>

This is pretty off-topic for IETF, but might be interesting to people.

I certainly agree that software independence (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_independence) is a good objective
for voting systems, and hand-counted paper ballots are one good way to
achieve that. However, there are voting environments where they are
problematic. Specifically, because the time to hand-count ballots scales
with both the number of ballots and the number of contests, in places like
California where there a large number of contests per election it can be
difficult to do a complete hand-count in a reasonable period of time.

One good alternative is hand-marked optical scan ballots which are then
verified via a risk limiting audit (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit). This can provide a much
more efficient count that still has software independence up to a given
risk level \alpha.

-Ekr



> Scott
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