Election audit was the second lessons-learned topic from the RSA panel that I wrote about earlier.  I illustrate with two examples.

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I spoke in a panel at the RSA Conference yesterday, on the topic of lessons learned in 2008 about voting technology. I thought I’d use this blog to share my remarks, but even though we each spoke for only 5 minutes before the question and answer period, I covered three areas of lessons learned; so I’ll cover them in separate blog posts on each topic of (1) Usability lessons (2) Audit lessons (3) Transparency lessons.

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I found a remarkably good, plain-English description of the insider threats of digital voting systems, and with an intriguing title: Computer Experts Warn of Sophisticated Dagdag Bawas with Automated Polls.

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I have to confess to being appalled by the number of times recently that I have heard people talk about potential benefits of "security by obscurity" for voting systems. It’s one of those bad old ideas that just won’t die: if you hide the inner workings (source code) of a complex device (a voting system), that makes it harder for an adversary to break (hack, steal elections).

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No, I am not going to lecture on why Internet voting is bad for half a dozen different reasons. In fact, Internet voting is both a horribly loaded term, and also a general topic that is not germane to our current work at OSDV — which is technologically fixing the election technology mess that we are in, without also trying to change the way elections work.

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The 2009 U.S.
Presidential election is now underway, with early voting having started in many
states. And pretty much right off the bat, we’re seeing problems with
reliability and reluctance. The story in New Jersey
is a familiar one writ large, but the contrast with Texas
and Florida
shows that often the same concerns– reliability and trust — lead to similar
reluctance about both using e-voting technology, and about avoiding it. The
kicker is the reluctance to avoid it, in Florida
– read on.

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There’s some intriguing and ironic details near the bottom of the on-going legal saga in Ohio.

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The notable election systems snafu news items of the week is a virus infection of Windows-based election systems sold by Premier Systems (Diebold) and used in Florida’s Pinellas county.

As a cause for alarm, the incident is pretty low, in that the infection was by ordinary Windows OS viruses, which can cripple a Windows system in a generic way. That’s not the much-speculated "targeted malware" that acts to change election data in the cases where the virus gets a foothold on an actual voting system machine.

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One of the most vexing frequent issues in e-voting debates is the idea of security vulnerabilities. I don’t think that security is *the* problem with actual e-voting systems, but I do think that in-security concerns are a significant problem with the way many people think about how we do e-voting.

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There’s a pretty regular stream of news about activities in the office of California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, de-certifying or re-certifying voting systems following the results of the state’s top-to-bottom review. Rather than making an up to the minute comment, I thought it would be useful to re-visit what I think is one of the more notable past scenes in the on-going drama.

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