Electronic Voting Systems

Since the 2000 election debacle in Florida, the US has made large investments in upgrading voting systems as mandated by the 2002 Help America Vote Act. Among the significant changes is the rapid and widespread deployment of electronic voting systems, and in particular Direct Recording Electronic systems (DREs) that collect and tabulate votes electronically. These machines have generated a great deal of concern among computer scientists and other technologists.

In this course I have tried to keep my own views out of the politically tinged issues that we have discussed, but I am making an exception in this case. Many people view electronic voting as a political issue, but there is a strong consensus among computer scientists about the underlying technological issues. I believe that this is an engineering question, and not a political one. Of course, you are free to disagree!

Assigned reading/viewing

Other resources

votingintegrity.org
verifiedvoting.org FAQ on DREs
NSF-funded ACCURATE voting center (Avi Rubin, Dan Wallach, et. al.)
blackboxvoting.org (partisanship rating: PG)
Justin Moore's voting page
Science Friday segment and HBO special on e-voting fraud

In 2005, the State of North Carolina outlawed paperless voting systems with Senate Bill 223, although its implementation is in question.