More EVoting bits

ElectricNews.net has a nice piece today on including a paper trail for electronic voting at http://www.electricnews.net/frontpage/news-9556350.html. It also mentions the findings of the commission which was setup in Ireland to investigate electronic and how they could not either certify the closed source code used in the system and that the lack of a paper verifiable audit trail was a definite point of issue. Given that the government appointed the commission I'm suprised they're judgement went even this far.

But as always these articles are lacking in some key aspects, the EVM2003 or Electronic Voting Machine project (http://evm2003.sourceforge.net/) which offers an open source implementation of the Open Voting Consortium (OVC) http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/ design standards. This was used successfully in Californa and would only have cost the Irish taxpayer for the actual machinery used and not for the software. It would have been more like €5 million rather €50.

One good reference which I think people are not reading is the paper: Analysis of an Electronic Voting System, Kohno T., Stubblefield A., Rubin A.D., Wallach D.S., Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P’04). This paper is a very comprehensive analysis of the US systems but the approaches taken are applicable to any system used as an electronic voting system. More details and information at http://avirubin.com/vote/.