Electronic Voting, a balloting system that allows votes to be entered and recorded in an electronic form. These balloting systems are also referred to as e-voting or direct-recording electronic systems (DREs).
The voter uses a direct entry device to register vote selections, and the entries are transferred (via circuitry) to electronic recording media, such as a computer hard drive or a memory card. The direct entry device may be electronic, as with a touch-screen, or electromechanical, such as a panel of pushbuttons.
The set of selections made by an individual voter comprises a ballot. electronic voting systems typically record the entire ballot as an electronic “image” although there is no real picture of the ballot, just data that represent the voter’s choices. After the polls close, the contents of the ballots are tabulated and reported by the voting system as vote totals. These totals are typically provided in a printed paper format that can be read by the workers at the individual precinct (or polling) locations. The totals can also be provided in an electronic form that can be transferred to a central system where the various precinct totals are consolidated at the municipal, county, or state level. See also Election.
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Balloting systems in which the voter makes selections on paper that are subsequently recorded electronically by using optical scanning or punch-card readers are considered to be electronic tabulation and are not truly electronic voting methods. The votes were not originally made electronically and so are not considered a form of electronic voting. However, vote-by-phone and Internet voting systems would be considered types of electronic voting because the original votes are made electronically.
II. ORIGINS OF ELECTRONIC VOTING
Electronic voting has been used in United States elections since the mid-1970s. The first electronic voting system is believed to be the Video Voter, an electromechanical device. The incentive for adopting electronic voting was to ease the vote-counting process and to make voting more accessible for disabled voters.
Adoption of e-voting systems in the United States was relatively slow, with only 7.7 percent of voters using DREs in the 1996 presidential election. The Help America Vote Act of 2002, however, provided more than $3 billion in federal funds for cities and towns to replace existing voting systems, especially punch-card systems like those that contributed to the disputed presidential election of 2000. Many of these systems were replaced with DRE systems. By 2004 slightly more than 30 percent of U.S. voters cast their ballots on DREs.
For the 2008 presidential election, this number is expected to decrease. Most states, including the highly populated states of California, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Ohio, either abolished electronic voting or required a paper receipt for an electronic vote after numerous government-funded studies confirmed the existence of vulnerabilities with these systems. However, many states do not have laws requiring a so-called paper trail. Countries that have used e-voting systems nationwide for public democratic elections include Brazil, Venezuela, and India.
III. PROBLEMS WITH ELECTRONIC VOTING
Scientific concerns about the reliability of electronic vote tallying were raised early on, in a 1975 report by voting technology consultant Roy Saltman at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards, now the National Institute of Standards and Technology. These findings were expanded to include DREs in a 1988 report by Saltman. Among the problems that Saltman identified were a lack of audit trails; poor design of computer programs; vendor-supplied computer software programs that were unavailable for scrutiny; incomplete and poorly implemented administrative procedures; lack of knowledge on the part of election administrators; and the possibility of undiscoverable fraud.
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... million voters, or about 28 percent of the voting population, used such electronic voting systems in 2004. This is about twice as many more than voted ... way of casting an individual's vote, through electronic voting. Electronic voting is a way to cast a person's ballot using an electronic voting machine that is touch screen. ...
Each of these items continues to be at issue in the controversies over electronic voting and tabulation. With regard to DREs, Saltman wrote, “The voter is given some reason to believe that the desired choices have been entered correctly into the temporary storage, but no independent proof can be provided to the voter that the choices have, in fact, been entered correctly for the purpose of summarizing those choices with all others to produce vote totals.”
IV. A ‘PAPER TRAIL’ FOR ELECTRONIC VOTING
This lack of an independent proof, or audit trail, for the vote data collected by DREs led numerous computer scientists to consider the requirement that all electronic election equipment should provide a printed version of the ballot that the voter could review for accuracy. During 1986 researchers discussed the mechanisms and process for producing, reviewing, securing, and auditing such printouts. Researcher Thomas W. Benson of Pennsylvania State University described what later was often referred to as the “paper ballot behind glass” method that could provide a secure paper audit receipt for electronic voting.
During the early 1990s the author of this article elaborated on this method by arguing that the printouts reviewed and validated by voters be impounded and considered the “ballots of record” rather than any electronic data. DRE-printed ballots are currently known as voter verified paper ballots (VVPB) or voter verified paper audit trails (VVPAT).
VVPBs or VVPATs can also be produced by equipment that does not electronically record the ballot image or vote data, such as devices used by disabled citizens that print or prepare a ballot to be optically scanned.
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As executive director responsible for dealing with voter turnout it has become my solemn duty to address this issue and to come up with ways which I can greatly improve the outcome. I started out by first debating about why the turnout rate is so low, and have come to the realization that the problem is rooted in both the political parties and the citizens. Citizen's attitudes have always played a ...
In 2003 computer scientist David Dill posted a petition about e-voting on his Web site at Stanford University that was eventually signed by more than 10,000 people, including about 2,000 technologists. This petition stated that “deployment of new voting machines that do not provide a voter-verifiable audit trail should be halted, and existing machines should be replaced or modified to produce ballots that can be checked independently by the voter before being submitted, and cannot be altered after submission. These ballots would count as the actual votes, taking precedence over any electronic counts.”
The petition, which was endorsed by Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, encouraged most states to enact VVPAT laws. However, a number of the VVPAT systems deployed in U.S. elections during 2004 and 2006 were implemented with continuous (reel-to-reel) paper ballots, instead of individual ballot papers. Many electronic voting experts considered this method problematic because of printer paper jams and the potential for violations of voter privacy.
The phrase “voter-verifiable” (rather than “voter-verified”) used in Dill’s petition was intended to include cryptographic methods that do not involve paper (see Cryptography).
Cryptographic methods are intended to ensure the secret ballot. This is important to prevent vote selling or coercion in which a voter might be required or induced to present a receipt of how they voted to anyone who would try to intimidate or bribe them for their vote. To prevent this from happening, computer scientist David Chaum proposed a method for encrypting a paper receipt. As he described it in a 2004 article: “In the voting booth, the voter can see his or her choices clearly printed on the receipt. After taking it out of the booth, the voter can use it to ensure that the votes it contains are included correctly in the final tally. But, because the choices are safely encrypted before it is removed from the booth, the receipt cannot be used to show others how the voter voted.”
Experts continue to debate whether paperless cryptographic voting systems can adequately secure ballot data while being sufficiently transparent for voter verification. Although not yet perfected, this technology may eventually show promise, as a number of experimental hybrid systems that apply cryptographic techniques to paper ballots have been developed. Computer scientists and other researchers also continue to debate whether electronic voting (with or without VVPBs or VVPATs) is vulnerable to fraud and denial-of-service attacks, such as those used by computer hackers to prevent or disrupt access to Internet sites. Such methods could be used to disenfranchise voters and
The Essay on Why You Vote
1920, this year should ring a bell in everybodys mind. Especially in the minds of over 50% of this class. 1920 is the year that women earned the right to vote. After 75 years of struggles, fighting, defeats pain & tears Susan B. Anthony and her followers accomplished their biggest goal by persuading the U.S. Government to give women the right to vote.Then 35 yrs ago in 1965 the federal ...
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