Buzz,
Summary,\
Detailed point-by-point review

In brief:
I am basic agreement with the thesis of the report which is that the debate about eVoting should move beyond voter-verified paper audit trails to include systems that can prove to a voter that their vote was counted as cast. However, I found the tone and focus of the report disagreeable and I disagreed with much of the material in the report advocating for eVoting and against voter-verified paper audit trails.

Thanks for coming by and offering a counterpoint! I’ll tell you what–I’ll take this comment and respond to it in its own post, since you brought up a few points I want to address.

I’m glad that you have reviewed our report, but I think you have missed (or misunderstood) our core arguments. We make three main points in the paper (and I only see you addressing the first one).

1. Paper audit trails have many limitations, which many discussions of paper audit trails do not consider.

2. We state in the paper that we want Congress to require that all e-voting machines have durable, independent, verifiable audit trails, but we should not mandate that these audit trails be paper. Many other (and arguably better) options exist, such as audio audit trails or video audit trails. Many of these other audit trail technologies work better for people with disabilities.

3. Finally, what we really want is for better voting technology that allows “end-to-end verifiability” or “universal verifiability.” This is the cryptography that we discuss in the latter part of the report, in systems such as VoteHere and Scratch & Vote (not mentioned in the paper, but also an option is Punchscan). We say that this is the goal we should be working towards — fully verifiable voting systems where a voter can verify that his or her ballot has been counted in the final vote tally BUT cannot prove to another voter how he or she voted. If you do not understand how this could work, then read the paper. We explain the cryptography behind it — and if our explanation does not convince you, then we provide references back to the academic papers that first proposed these ideas.

Martin, I would be happy to talk to you further if you have more questions about the report.

Anyway here is the link to the paper for everyone else — http://www.itif.org/files/evoting.pdf

Didn’t we already established that your priorities are warped on occasion?

I thought the same thing you did, but in the course of working on the FCW article, I found it to be far more complex. For example, disabled-rights groups are furiously opposed to paper balloting as they consider it a form of disenfranchisement. There’s also debate about the different types of auditing, from VPATs (Verified Paper Audit Trails) to VVPATS (Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trails) and everything in between.

At its core, it is simple, but there are a lot of issues to consider that people don’t think about.

Seriously, “election fraud can be caused by crappy electronic voting machines” is a lot easier for me to wrap my brain around than “companies shouldn’t be allowed to charge more for faster Net bandwidth because it sets up two classes of internet users that are separate but unequal.”

Thanks for this post that shows that corporate interests seem to want to trump democratic imperatives yet again…