An Overview of Electronic Voting and Security

Citation

• M. Bishop, “An Overview of Electronic Voting and Security”, Yolo County Clerk/Recorder, Woodland, CA 95695 (Dec. 2003).

Paper

• PDF
• PS

About This Report

From the introduction:

This paper is organized as follows. First, we discuss the goal of e-voting systems to derive requirements. We focus specifically on those requirements relevant to e-voting machines used in the context of current elections, and not on the use of e-voting machines to provide support for all of the voting process. The third section discusses how those suggest properties of e-voting systems. The fourth uses available public materials to examine current voting machines in the light of the questions developed in section 3. The last section summarizes the qualities that e-voting systems must preserve to maintain both the integrity of elections and the appearance of integrity of elections.

Background

In 2003, the Clerk/Recorder of Yolo County asked me to look at electronic voting machines and tell her about their security. I had no access to anything except public sources. This is the report. This was also my first foray into electronic voting. I also included the references; the “item” numbers in each reference refers to the location of the documents in the supplementaty material. These documents, however, are (mostly) copyrighted, so I cannot post them.