Fortify's report summarizes electronic as well as traditional methods of voting including absentee ballots. This voting guide will provide recommendations for voters who want to make sure their vote counts and for federal and state governments on how to devise efficient and accurate voting processes and systems.
Voting in AmericaHuman and Technical Factors Integral
to Democratic Elections
Brian Chess bchess@fortify.com
Joy Forsythejforsythe@fortify.com Jacob West, jwest@fortify.com voting in america WWW.FORTIFY.COM 1Voting in AmericaHuman and Technical Factors Integral to Democratic Elections
Abstract Elections are the core of the democratic process. In order for an election to remain truly democratic, it must uphold four critical properties: privacy, incoercibility, accuracy and verifiability. In this paper we analyze threats against these properties during the three phases of an election (voter registration, casting votes, and tabulating votes), highlight specific ways voting systems have been compromised, summarize the strengths and weaknesses of current voting techniques, and give guidance for voters to ensure their votes are handled properly in upcoming elections. We conclude with a look to the future of voting systems in America and recommendations for how the federal government and state governments can work with voting machine vendors to adopt business software assurance techniques into the systems they create.
Table of Contents
3 Executive Summary5 Introduction6 The Election Process11 Voting Today16 The Future18 Conclusion
voting in america WWW.FORTIFY.COM 2Executive Summary
For the past several years, much attention has been focused in the United States on security issues associated with e-voting, and whether a cast vote will ultimately in fact be counted at the polls. The concern is at once so important and seemingly straightforward, that it is surprising to many that a solution hasn't emerged over the course of several national elections. However, America's voting system today is a mixture of many voting systems?-?each with respective benefits and drawbacks. The real focus of secure elections must harmonize secure technologies alongside effective processes that guarantee four properties of voting: . Privacy??-??voters have the right to keep their ballots secret.. Incoercibility?-?voters cannot prove the contents of their cast ballots.. Accuracy?-?the final tally is the sum of all cast ballots.. Verifiability?-?voters can prove to themselves that their ballots were cast as intended and counted, and anyone can prove that the final tally is accurate.
Recommendations:1. Any widespread improvement to the election process must detail improvements to both the processes and the technologies used to conduct elections. Of the two, technology poses the most immediate challenge, because it provides the foundation on which election process and execution are built. Whether a technology enables back-end systems, such as tabulating optical scan ballots, or drives a purely electronic voting mechanism, such as DRE, the fact remains that every scalable system designed to protect privacy, incoercibility, accuracy, and verifiability in an election is controlled by software. Therefore, in order to build software systems that uphold these critical properties, election officials, at both the state and federal level, must work with voting machine vendors to ensure security and robustness is built into the software at the core of elections. 2. Governments and voting machine vendors should learn from the commercial sector and work together to develop capabilities for building security into voting systems. Specifically, these capabilities should include code review and penetration testing techniques, such as the ones employed in the 2007 California review, designed to prevent the kind of blatant errors that have been found in code responsible for running voting machines. Consistent review would not only catch such errors but would help in establishing code practices that lead to robust systems.
voting in america WWW.FORTIFY.COM 33. Fortify urges government and voters to follow a recommended preferred ranking of widely available voting techniques:. Choice 1?-?Hand-Counted Paper: The advantages of hand-counted paper ballots are verifiability and accuracy. Voters can verify their selections before placing ballots in a publicly observable ballot box. After all ballots are cast, they are counted openly to provide public verifiability of the final election. . Choice 2?-?Optical Scan: Optical scan voting shares many of the advantages of hand-counted ballots and is logistically more convenient and scalable. The accur... [download for more]
