Source: https://en.youscribe.com/catalogue/documents/professional-resources/it-systems/accurate-public-comment-on-the-voluntary-voting-system-guidelines-538598
Timestamp: 2020-07-09 06:07:24
Document Index: 325781675

Matched Legal Cases: ['art 1', 'art 1', 'art 1', 'art 1', 'art 1', 'art 1', 'art 1', 'art 1', 'art 1', 'art 1', 'art 1', 'art 1']

ACCURATE Public Comment on the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG), Version II (Round One) - Aaron Burstein and Joseph Lorenzo Hall - IT systems
Aaron Burstein and Joseph Lorenzo Hall - Shawyeg
PUBLIC COMMENT ONTHE VOLUNTARY VOTING SYSTEM GUIDELINES,∗VERSION II (FIRST ROUND)SubmittedtoTheUnitedStatesElectionAssistanceCommissionMay5,2008∗This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under A Center for Correct, Usable,Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections (ACCURATE), Grant Number CNS 0524745. Any opinions, ﬁndings, andconclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reﬂect the viewsof the National Science Foundation. This public comment narrative was prepared by Aaron Burstein and Joseph LorenzoHall of the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic along with comments from the Principal Investigators andAdvisoryBoardMembersoftheNSFACCURATECenter.ACCURATEPrincipalInvestigatorsAvielD.Rubin DanS.WallachACCURATEDirector ACCURATEAssociateDirectorDepartmentofComputerScience DepartmentofComputerScienceJohnsHopkinsUniversity RiceUniversityrubin@cs.jhu.edu dwallach@cs.rice.eduhttp://www.cs.jhu.edu/~rubin/ http://www.cs.rice.edu/~dwallach/DanBoneh MichaelD.ByrneDepartmentofComputerScience DepartmentofPsychologyStanfordUniversity RiceUniversitydabo@cs.stanford.edu byrne@rice.eduhttp://crypto.stanford.edu/~dabo/ http://chil.rice.edu/byrne/DavidL.Dill DouglasW.JonesDepartmentofComputerScience DepartmentofComputerScienceStanfordUniversity UniversityofIowadill@cs.stanford.edu jones@cs.uiowa.eduhttp://verify.stanford.edu/dill/ http://www.cs.uiowa ...
P UBLIC C OMMENT ON THE V OLUNTARY V OTING S YSTEM G UIDELINES , V ERSION II(F IRST R OUND ) ∗
∗ This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections (ACCURATE), Grant Number CNS-0524745. Any opinions, ﬁndings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reﬂect the views of the National Science Foundation. This public comment narrative was prepared by Aaron Burstein and Joseph Lorenzo Hall of the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic along with comments from the Principal Investigators and Advisory Board Members of the NSF ACCURATE Center.
Deir S d c r h e oo K l . of M L u a ll w igan Peter G. Neumann UniversityofCalifornia,BerkeleyCompuSteRrIISnctieernncaetiLoanbaloratory dmulligan@law.berkeley.edu ne n cs m http://www.law.berkeley.edu/faculty/uman@l.sri.co uman profiles/facultyProfile.php?facID=1018http://www.csl.sri.com/users/nen/
David A. Wagner Brent Waters Department of Computer Science Computer Science Laboratory University of California, Berkeley SRI International daw@cs.berkeley.edu bwaters@csl.sri.com http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/ http://www.csl.sri.com/users/bwaters/
Preface A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections (ACCURATE), 1 a multi-institution, multidisciplinary, academic research project funded by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) “CyberTrust Program,” 2 is pleased to provide these comments on the Voluntary Voting Sys-tem Guidelines to the Election Assistance Commission (EAC). ACCURATE was established to im-prove election technology. ACCURATE conducts research investigating software architecture, tamper-resistant hardware, cryptographic protocols and veriﬁcation systems as applied to electronic voting systems. Additionally, ACCURATE is evaluating voting system usability and how public policy, in combination with technology, can better facilitate voting nationwide. Since receiving NSF funding in 2005, ACCURATE has made a number of important contributions to the science and policy of electronic voting. 3 The ACCURATE Center has published groundbreaking results in cryptography, usability, and veriﬁcation of voting systems. ACCURATE has also been ac-tively contributing to the policy discussion through regulatory ﬁlings, through testimony and advising decisionmakers as well as conducting policy research. 4 ACCURATE researchers have participated in running elections and assisting election ofﬁcials in activities such as unprecedented technical evaluation of voting systems and redesigning election procedures. 5 Finally, the education and outreach mission of ACCURATE has ﬂourished through the development of numerous undergraduate and graduate classes 6 and the creation of the premier venue for research involving voting systems. With experts in computer science, systems, security, usability, and technology policy, and knowledge of election technology, procedure, law and practice, ACCURATE is uniquely positioned to provide helpful guidance to the EAC as it attempts to strengthen the speciﬁcations and requirements that ensure the functionality, accessibility, security, privacy and equality of our voting technology. We welcome this opportunity to further assist the EAC and hope this process continues the collabo-ration between the EAC and independent, academic experts in order to sustain improvements in election systems and procedures.
1 See: http://www.accurate-voting.org/ 2 National Science Foundation Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering, Cyber Trust, at http: //www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pim _ rg=C s id=13451&o ISE . 3 2006 Annual Report . A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections, January 2007 h URL: http://accurate-voting.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/AR.2007.pdf i ; 2007 Annual Report . A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections, January 2008 h URL: http://accurate-voting.org/ wp-content/uploads/2008/01/2007.annual.report.pdf i 4 List of ACCURATE Testimony . ACCURATE Website h URL: http://accurate-voting.org/pubs/testimony/ i ; Aaron J. Burstein, Joseph Lorenzo Hall and Deirdre K. Mulligan, Public Comment on the Manual for Voting System Test-ing & Certiﬁcation Program (submitted on behalf of ACCURATE to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission) . October 2006 h URL: http://accurate-voting.org/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/ACCURATE_VSTCP_comment.pdf i . 5 ACCURATE researchers have participated in the comprehensive voting system evaluations sponsored by the States of California and Ohio. We reference these in Section 2. 6 For more on our educational output, please see those sections of our Annual Reports (see note 3). The joint USENIX/ACCURATE Workshop on Electronic Voting Technology (EVT), colocated with the USENIX Security Sympo-sium, was started in 2006 and continues to attract high caliber voting technology research. See: http://www.usenix.org/ event/evt08/ .
Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Introduction and Background
The Importance of Software Independence 2.1 Software Independence and Auditing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Critical New Security and Reliability Testing 3.1 Adversarial Vulnerability Testing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Volume Testing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Advances in Usability and Accessibility Testing
New Requirements for Voting System Documentation 5.1 Documentation as Support for Voting System Properties . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Aiding State and Local Election Administration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Conﬁdentiality and Intellectual Property Requirements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Need for Institutional Support 6.1 The Innovation Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Incident Reporting and Feedback . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion
1 Introduction and Background The current draft of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) aptly identiﬁes the properties that a voting system should embody: fairness, accuracy, transparency, security, accessibility, veriﬁability and timeliness. Experience with electronic voting systems has demonstrated that the requirements and testing in previous standards and guidelines were unable to produce systems that exhibit all of these properties. As ACCURATE pointed out in its comments on the 2005 VVSG, only requirements written with an understanding of how they will affect design, testing, and implementation are likely to lead to real systems that embody these properties. 1 Two of the main recommendations in those comments were (1) that the EAC adopt guidelines that create requirements reﬂecting the state of the art in speciﬁc disciplines, rather than relying on functional testing; and (2) that the guidelines provide mechanisms to incorporate experience with ﬁelded systems into revisions of the requirements. We are pleased to ﬁnd that the current draft of the VVSG takes signiﬁcant steps toward adopting these approaches. The result is a set of guidelines that present detailed, coherent requirements for voting system security, usability, accessibility, and auditability. Moreover, the current draft would help make data available to conduct ongoing examinations of several important facets of voting systems. Put together with the EAC’s Voting System Test Laboratory Accreditation Program, Voting System Certiﬁcation Program, and the EAC’s development as a clearinghouse for research and reports on many aspects of voting systems, the draft guidelines will form part of a system that will help create and maintain the trustworthiness of voting systems in the United States. A fundamental insight that underlies the draft is that voting technologies are so complex that it is not realistic to deﬁnitively establish that a given device or system conforms to a certain high-level property, such as security or usability. As we discuss throughout these comments, the VVSG draft contains a num-ber of innovative ways of handling this complexity. With respect to security, the concept of software independence provides a groundbreaking framework for requirements that should prevent undetected changes in voting technology from affecting the outcome of an election. In Section 2 we discuss how this framework ties together requirements for security, auditing, accessibility, and documentation. Sec-tions 3 and 4 explain how the VVSG draft signiﬁcantly improves upon previous guidelines in terms of taking voting system complexity into account when setting requirements for security, reliability, and usability testing. Nevertheless, further improvements are needed. Section 5 highlights how changes in documentation requirements will lead to voting systems submissions that test labs can more easily evaluate and documentation that election ofﬁcials and pollworkers can more easily use. Finally, Sec-tion 6 outlines ways in which the EAC can lend ongoing institutional support to ensure that the VVSG incorporates feedback from the ﬁeld as well as changes in the several disciplines that must inform voting system design.
2 Software Independence is Critical for the Future of Voting System Cer-tiﬁcation Software independence is one of the major conceptual advances in the current draft of the VVSG. 2 As the deﬁnition in Part 1:2.7 states, “software independence means that an undetected error or fault in the 1 Public Comment on the 2005 Voluntary Voting System Guidelines . A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections (ACCURATE), September 2005 h URL: http://accurate-voting.org/accurate/docs/2005_ vvsg_comment.pdf i . 2 The initial formulation of software independence was given by Rivest and Wack: Ronald L. Rivest and John Wack, On the Notion of “Software Independence” in Voting Systems . National Institute of Standards and Technology HAVA Technical Guidelines Development Committee, July 2006 h URL: http://vote.nist.gov/SI-in-voting.pdf i .
voting system’s software is not capable of causing an undetectable change in election results.” 3 Though this deﬁnition may appear to be rather abstract, it addresses a broad array of practical problems facing electronic voting systems. To see why this is so, we discuss in this section what software independence does and does not do. Software independence represents a general, ﬂexible requirement to counter a problem that any elec-tronic voting system is likely to encounter: The software, hardware, and other technologies 4 necessary to support election activities are typically so complex that it is effectively impossible to verify their cor-rect operation by either formal proofs or testing. 5 Moreover, even if the logic in voting devices could be fully veriﬁed in a test lab, it would still be necessary to ensure that the hardware, software and ﬁrmware used in actual elections are identical to the systems that were tested. While the VVSG draft sets forth important improvements in testing requirements that support this assurance, improved testing alone will never be able to replace software independence as a security measure. The underlying premise of the software independence approach is that, no matter how hard one looks for errors or faults in voting system software, there is no way to guarantee that one has found them all. Even if no errors or faults are found, there is no way to guarantee that none exist. Software independence provides a conceptual framework to ensure that accidental programming errors do not affect the outcome of an election, as well as to detect intentionally introduced malicious software. Examples of accidental programming errors in voting systems are legion. For example, in November 2004, 4,400 votes were permanently lost after DREs in Carteret County, North Carolina exceeded their vote storage capacity without alerting voters or pollworkers. 6 Far more subtle issues arising from programming errors have also been found. During a volume test of DREs in California, for example, testers found that voters with long ﬁngernails who used a dragging motion on the touch screen could cause the device to crash. 7 Both incidents illustrate the risks of recording votes on a single electronic device. Of course, numerous studies have shown that currently deployed voting systems are susceptible to undetectable malicious attacks. The voting systems produced by all four manufacturers with signiﬁcant market share in the United States have been subjected to thorough batteries of adversarial testing, source code review, accessibility testing and documentation review. 8 All of these systems have vulnerabilities 3 To clarify that software independence applies to any number of errors or faults, the Commission might consider changing the deﬁnition to read: “software independence means that undetected errors or faults in the voting system’s software are not capable of causing an undetectable change in election results.” 4 As a November 2006 NIST staff discussion draft on software independence noted, the phrase “ ‘[s]oftware independence’ should be interpreted to really mean complex technology independence ” to include software implemented in hardware, such as programmable read-only memory and circuit boards. See: National Institute of Standards and Technology, Requiring Software Independence in VVSG 2007: STS Recommendations for the TGDC . November 2006 h URL: http://vote.nist. gov/DraftWhitePaperOnSIinVVSG2007-20061120.pdf i 5 Note, however, that recent research has shown that it is possible to starkly reduce the scope of what one must trust in a voting system. See, for example, Ka-Ping Yee, Building Reliable Voting Machine Software . Ph. D thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2007, h URL: http://zesty.ca/pubs/yee-phd.pdf i ; Ronald L. Rivest and Warren D. Smith, Three-VotingProtocols: ThreeBallot, VAV, and Twin. In Proceedings of the Second Electronic Voting Technology Workshop (EVT). August 2007 h URL: http://www.usenix.org/events/evt07/tech/full_papers/rivest/rivest.pdf i . 6 More than 4,500 North Carolina Votes Lost Because of Mistake in Voting Machine Capacity . USA To-day (Associated Press), November 2004 h URL: http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/ 2004-11-04-votes-lost_x.htm i . 7 David Jefferson et al., Lessons from the Diebold TSx “sliding ﬁnger” bug (unpublished) . Oct 2005. 8 Software Reviews and Security Analyses of Florida Voting Systems . Florida State University’s Security and Assur-ance in Information Technology Laboratory, February 2008 h URL: http://www.sait.fsu.edu/research/evoting/ index.shtml i ; Patrick McDaniel et al., EVEREST: Evaluation and Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Stan-dards and Testing (Academic Final Report) . December 2007 h URL: http://www.sos.state.oh.us/sos/info/EVEREST/ 14-AcademicFinalEVERESTReport.pdf i ; Top-To-Bottom Review of California’s Voting Systems . California Secretary of State, March 2007 h URL: http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_vsr.htm i ; Ariel J. Feldman, J. Alex Hal-
that could relatively easily be exploited to alter the results of an election. These studies demonstrate that individual vote-capture devices as well as central-count systems are susceptible to attacks that could lead to undetected changes in election results. The usefulness of software independence is also evident in situations in which the presence of a voting system fault is a matter of dispute. In the November 2006 election for a representative from Florida’s 13th Congressional District, an unusually high proportion of votes cast on paperless DREs in Sarasota County recorded no vote for this race. Subsequent litigation, academic and government studies, and public debate explored whether ballot design, miscalibration, software errors, or some other cause (e.g., voters choosing not to vote) was responsible for the undervotes in this race. Though the ofﬁcial study of this election by the Government Accountability Ofﬁce “did not identify any problems that would indicate that the machines were responsible for the undervote,” 9 others have pointed out that the scope of this study was too narrow to rule out miscalibration and other hypotheses. 10 In any event, this investigation, which took more than half of the Congressional term to bring to a conclusion, was likely prolonged, and the controversy intensiﬁed, by the fact that the voting devices in question did not produce a record of votes that was independent of those recorded by the DREs. It is against this background—unreliability in the ﬁeld; the prospect of undetectable, malicious at-tacks; and the inconclusiveness of post-election analysis in purely electronic systems—that the EAC should view the software independence requirement. Software independence is ﬂexible enough to real-istic assumptions about voter behavior. Some voters might neglect to inspect the independent records that some software-independent voting systems (e.g., DREs with a voter-veriﬁable paper audit trail [VVPAT] and optical scan systems) produce. 11 Others might be unable to do so because of visual im-pairment or other disabilities. In both cases, however, software independence is still achievable. The point of software independence is not that each voter must be able to verify that his or her selections are captured accurately by two independent channels. Instead, software independence requires that any change in the vote record that is counted is detectable at some point. For example, in an optical scan system (perhaps used in conjunction with an electronic ballot mark-ing device), software independence would not require that each voter be able to verify that the scanner correctly interprets and records the marks on his or her ballot. Instead, properly designed and executed post-election recounts of optically scanned paper ballots can expose errors in the machine tally. This independent check on election results supports the software independence of optical scan systems. A larger scheme of routine post-election audits and technical requirements for records to support such audits are integral to achieving software independence. Many other sections of the VVSG draft provide these supporting technical requirements. 12 In particular, the current draft’s requirements for derman and Edward W. Felten, Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine. In Proceedings of USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop. August 2007 h URL: http://www.usenix.org/events/ evt07/tech/full papers/feldman/feldman.pdf i _ 9 U S. Government Accountability Ofﬁce, Results of GAO’s Testing of Voting Systems Used in Sarasota County in Florida’s . 13th Congressional District (Statement Before the Task Force for the Contested Election in the 13th Congressional District of Florida, Committee on House Administration, House of Representatives) . February 2008 h URL: http://www.gao.gov/new. items/d08425t.pdf i . 10 Veriﬁed Voting Foundation, GAO Report Not a Clean Bill of Health for Voting Machines: Limited Scope Investigation Not Conclusive . February 2008 h URL: http://www.verifiedvotingfoundation.org/downloads/VVF-Statement-GAO. pdf i . 11 Sarah P. Everett, The Usability of Electronic Voting Machines and How Votes Can Be Changed Without Detection . Rice University PhD Thesis, May 2007 h URL: http://chil.rice.edu/alumni/petersos/EverettDissertation.pdf i . 12 Specifying audit procedures, on the other hand, would be outside the scope of the VVSG. Still, given the increasing number of states that require routine post-election audits and the prospect of a federal audit requirement, audits are a crucial piece of election administration that the VVSG should address. For a review of state audit laws and recent scholarly work on post-election audits, see Lawrence Norden et al., Post-Election Audits: Restoring Trust in Elections . Brennan Center for Justice at The New York University School of Law and The Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at the University
an audit architecture (Part 1:4.2), vote and report data exchange (Part 1:6.6-B), and for independent voter-veriﬁable records (IVVR) (Part 1:4.4) would help ensure voting systems produce records that support audits designed to detect discrepancies between two independent sources of an election tally. (See Section 2.1 for more extensive comments on the VVSG draft’s treatment of voting system auditing architecture.) An example of such an architecture is the combination of electronic records and VVPAT records from a DRE-VVPAT system. The current draft also leaves room for new technologies to improve upon or replace current systems; though the draft speciﬁes that providing an IVVR is one way that a voting system may achieve software independence, it does not require this approach. The innovation class (Part 1:2.7) would allow other approaches to be recognized as software independent. 13 Still, though a requirement of software independence is necessary to guard against changes in the outcome of an election, it is not, by itself, sufﬁcient to guard against all instances in which a voter’s intended ballot selections differ from those that are actually cast. In particular, a software independence requirement does not supplant the need for broader software reliability requirements and testing. For example, software that occasionally causes a DRE system to skip a page of the ballot could cause undervotes in the contests on that page, but the two records of the vote would not show a discrepancy. 14 Or voting system software might run more slowly, or crash more frequently, once a speciﬁc candidate is chosen. 15 These types of errors are not readily addressed within the software independence framework; the reliability, usability, and accessibility testing requirements that we address later in these comments are necessary complements to software independence. To summarize, the software independence requirements are integral to the overall structure of the current VVSG draft. Software independence represents a well-deﬁned objective for the trustworthiness of elections conducted using highly complex, electronic voting devices. It provides a framework to greatly increase the likelihood of detecting changes in election results caused by software errors, relative to formal testing and analysis of these systems. Finally, many other requirements in the VVSG draft support software independence, and their full utility is achieved when they are tied to the overarching requirement of software independence. We would like to reiterate that testing and analysis alone will never be able to conﬁrm correct op-eration of voting systems, and therefore cannot replace software independence as an accuracy, integrity and security measure.
2.1 The Requirements for Software Independence and Auditing Architecture Are Inti-mately Related The VVSG draft emphasizes and articulates the importance of post-election audits. A core requirement of software independence obliges voting systems to recover from software failures. The methods for recovery currently contemplated by the draft VVSG involve auditing; that is, checking or counting, often by hand, audit records via a means independent of the voting system. ACCURATE researchers have long recognized the importance of auditing elections. 16 Fortunately, most states require or have of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall), 2007 h URL: http://www.brennancenter.org/dynamic/subpages/ download file 50227.pdf i _ _ 13 We comment in detail on the innovation class in section 6.1. 14 Yee (as in n. 5), pages 181-185 discusses this and other examples in greater depth. 15 See id. 16 Peter G. Neumann, Risks in Computerized Elections. Communications of the ACM, 33 November 1990. For more recent commentary and research from ACCURATE on audits, see: David Dill and Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Testimony: Post-Election Au-dits of California’s Voting Systems . The California Secretary of State’s Post-Election Audit Standards (PEAS) Working Group, July 2007; Arel Cordero, David Wagner and David Dill, The Role of Dice in Election Audits—Extended Abstract. IAVoSS Workshop on Trustworthy Elections 2006 (WOTE 2006), June 2006 h URL: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/ dice-wote06.pdf i ; Rebekah Gordon, Elections Ofﬁce Gets Tips from Experts. San Mateo County Times, November 2006
procured voting systems that produce audit trails. 17 In this section, we highlight how the VVSG draft establishes requirements to help ensure that audit records support the goal of auditability. It is essential that national-level requirements specify a basis for auditing that all voting systems must support. Well-speciﬁed audit support requirements applied at the national level will ensure that voting systems can support a wide variety of auditing schemes. This will help to guarantee that voting systems will have the capacity to support new methods of conducting audits in the future as new laws are adopted and new audit methods are vetted by the scientiﬁc community. In terms of forensic capability, the draft VVSG audit requirements appropriately require voting systems to capture and keep evidence of error or possible fraud, at an appropriate level of granularity. First, we comment generally on the term “post-election audit”. In general, election auditing en-compasses checking for agreement and consistency amongst records used with or created by the voting system. There are other types of audits and audit-related activities other than those speciﬁed in the VVSG that election systems should be designed to support. For example, auditing event logs—logs that record the times and descriptions of voting system events—allow detecting anomalous events such as machines being opened before polls were open, machines being reset or rebooted, or even unusual patterns of ballot casting. In the election audit community, the term “post-election audit” has come to refer to the more narrow practice of conducting a manual tally of physical audit records and comparing the result to the electronic result stored by the EMS (the third type of audit in the list below). Even within post-election audits, the Carter Center has introduced the idea of “hot” and “cold” audits, where the former can impact the certiﬁed result and the latter are used as part of a continual quality monitoring program and do not affect the outcome of the certiﬁed result. 18 That being said, the VVSG draft refers to three types of audits: • The phrase “pollbook audit” (Part 1:4.2.1) refers to counting pollbook signatures and comparing that count to the vote data reported by the tabulator. • The phrase “hand audits of IVVR records” (Part 1:4.2.2) refers to manually counting audit records and comparing to the vote totals reported by the tabulator. • The phrase “ballot count and vote total audit” (Part 1:4.2.3) refers to manually counting audit records and comparing to the vote totals reported by the EMS. We will call this a “manual tally” audit. For election ofﬁcials, the pollbook audit is typically only one part of a larger process, often called “ballot reconciliation”, that starts immediately after election day and involves the mentioned pollbook audit but also includes activities such as balancing the voted, spoiled and unused ballot stock with the number of ballots sent to each precinct. To our knowledge, few if any jurisdictions employ the second notion of auditing above, comparing a hand audit of audit records to totals produced by a tabulator, regardless of what the EMS reports. 19 h URL: http://www.shapethefuture.org/press/2006/insidebayareacom113006.asp i 17 Norden et al. (as in n. 12). 18 Summary of Proceedings, Automated Voting and Election Observation . The Carter Center, March 2005 h URL: http: //www.ciaonet.org/wps/car071/car071.pdf i . 19 Note: The last two types of audits may seem equivalent at ﬁrst blush; however, the difference is that the manual count in each case is compared to two different sets of electronic records: those from the precinct tabulator device and, in the other case, from the central Election Management System software.
2.1.1 The VVSG Draft’s Auditing Requirements Will Signiﬁcantly Enhance Voting System Au-ditability The VVSG’s chapter on Audit Architecture requirements (Part 1:4) will greatly enhance the auditability of voting systems certiﬁed to the guidelines. These requirements cover much of the ground towards achieving auditability of IVVR voting systems; they include requirements by type of audit being per-formed (pollbook audits, tabulator audits and manual tallies), requirements for electronic audit records, and requirements for physical audit records. With one exception, discussed in the next section, the VVSG draft addresses each area of auditing from a systems perspective. The VVSG draft is also appropriately forward-thinking with respect to support for auditability. For example, none of the major manufacturers currently support digital signatures for audit data. 20 This is problematic, as auditors need to be able to compare results of a manual audit to digitally-signed electronic results. Without veriﬁcation support using tools such as digital signatures, parties with an interest in corrupting the audit or hiding evidence of error could fabricate the audit records or render them unusable through denial-of-service attacks. The VVSG draft, however, requires digital signatures be used with electronic audit data so that the content can be veriﬁed as produced by a speciﬁc device at a speciﬁc time. The draft further addresses problematic features of currently deployed voting technologies. For ex-ample, Part 1:4.4.2.2-B requires that voting systems with VVPAT capability be able to detect problems that might affect the printing, recording, or storage of the VVPAT record and, upon such a detection, pro-hibit the voter’s ballot from being cast. Currently, only one manufacturer’s VVPAT subsystem (Hart In-terCivic’s eSlate DRE with VBO VVPAT) has this capability. Missing, destroyed or unreadable VVPAT records have become increasingly prevalent, affecting the quality and, in some cases, the possibility of conducting post-election manual tallies of VVPAT records. Finally, the VVSG draft supports some future directions of voting system auditing models that are now only nascent. For example, the requirements in Part 1:4.4.3.1-A–A.1 allow precinct-count optical scan (PCOS) systems to make optional marks on ballots during the casting and scanning process while restricting these optional marks to speciﬁc areas of the ballot face for security reasons. Researchers are now working on methods to increase the effectiveness and efﬁciency of manual tally audits using machine-assisted auditing that would require optional marks to be written on a ballot at the time of casting. 21
2.1.2 Further Enhancements of the VVSG Draft Are Needed to Better Support Auditing Currently deployed systems exhibit a number of shortcomings with respect to supporting audit activities. For example, manual tally procedures often specify that the vote totals—the quantities being audited— must be made available to the public before the random selection and manual tally. 22 However, some manufacturers’ EMSs do not report totals in a way that would be useful for an auditor or public observer. For example, vote totals for ballots cast on PCOS systems in the precinct are often automatically mixed with totals for DRE+VVPAT votes cast in the same precinct. Mixing two or more sets of vote totals for devices that require different auditing methods frustrates auditing and observing efforts; hand counting PCOS ballots is a different process from hand counting VVPAT records. 20 Even in the places that manufacturers do use digital signatures, they often misuse them. California Top-To-Bottom Review (as in n. 8); McDaniel et al. (as in n. 8) 21 Joseph A. Calandrino, J. Alex Halderman and Edward W. Felten, Machine-Assisted Election Auditing. USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop 2007, August 2007 h URL: http://www.usenix.org/ events/evt07/tech/full_papers/calandrino/calandrino.pdf i . 22 This ensures that the public can verify that the tally agrees with results to which the election ofﬁcial has previously committed.
In some cases, the manufacturers’ EMSs will not report machine-speciﬁc results within a precinct. Unfortunately, this often means that a manual tally of, say, four to ﬁve VVPAT rolls for a given precinct can be compared only with aggregate precinct totals, instead of on a machine-by-machine basis. Con-sidering that it might take one tally team of four people over 4 hours to tally the VVPAT rolls for one precinct, ﬁnding a discrepancy after all that effort is ineffective; if there is a discrepancy, the EMS report contains no information that would be helpful in locating on which VVPAT roll the discrepancy might be contained. 23 This can result, due to blind counting rules, 24 in the tally team having to redo the tally for that precinct’s VVPAT rolls. If the EMS had reported vote totals for each machine in the precinct, the tally team would have had to retally a small number of VVPAT rolls. State-of-the-art auditing methodologies can also place distinct requirements on voting systems. For example, statistically conservative audit schemes 25 start with a ﬂat percentage audit, then require the auditor to calculate a statistical conﬁdence value and, if needed, increase the sample size of the audit. However, some manufacturers’ EMSs will produce meaningful results only in PDF format, a format useful for presentation of information but not useful for computation. To calculate a statistical quantity with data from hundreds of precincts in such an unusable format would require an army of transcribers. If EMSs had the capability to output vote totals in an open, machine-readable and machine-processable format, they would better support more sophisticated forms of election audits. It is clear that adequate support for auditing manual tallies requires two important features: 1. The vote data stored by the EMS should be kept at the level of ballot and device granularity appropriate for the manual tally; and, 2. The EMS must be able to output this information in a form useful for all parties involved in the manual tally procedure. These guidelines illustrate a few important points about the EMS’s storage of vote data. First, different ballot types need be kept separate in the EMS database according to the type of casting methods as well as ballot status (e.g., provisional, regular, vote-by-mail, and early voting). Data is meaningful for audit purposes only if the EMS can output reports that include this level of detail. Second, this data should be kept at a level of granularity that corresponds to the audit unit. For lower-capacity voting devices, the device level is probably the best level of granularity here as opposed to the level of individual VVPAT-rolls, which might be difﬁcult for the machine to keep track of. For high-capacity devices such as central-count optical scanners, storing data on the batch level makes more sense. Some of these requirements might be covered by Part 1:4.2.2-A.1 of the VVSG, but only at a high-level; it would seem wise to attempt to specify these elements in more detail. A related recommendation is that the system should support locating types of ballots to support the auditing context. For example, if a jurisdiction is performing a precinct-level audit, it will need to locate all the ballots for that precinct. For vote-by-mail (VBM) ballots, which are often scanned centrally in batches rather than sorted into precincts, it makes sense for the EMS to provide reports that list in which batch a precinct’s VBM ballots are located and how many are in each batch. 26 23 To take this example to an extreme, even if a precinct uses 40 DREs with VVPAT printers, all the votes might be combined into one quantity by the EMS. The obvious problem with this design is that after counting 40 machines-worth of VVPAT rolls by hand, if there is a discrepancy, the system gives the auditor no information about which machine(s) might hold the discrepancies. 24 A blind count is where the tally team manually counts the ballots without knowing the result they should achieve. Blind counting ensures that no conscious or unconscious incentives exist for artiﬁcially making the tally and electronic count match. 25 Philip B. Stark, Conservative Statistical Post-Election Audits (in press). The Annals of Applied Statistics, 2008 h URL: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~stark/Preprints/conservativeElectionAudits07.pdf i . 26 To support including valid provisional ballots cast on DRE+VVPAT machines, the EMS should be able to tell the auditor