Post-Election Audits: Restoring Trust in Elections

With the intention of assisting legislators, election officials and the public to make sense of recent literature on post-election audits and convert it into realistic audit practices, the Brennan Center and the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic at Boalt Hall School of Law (University of California Berkeley) convened a blue ribbon panel (the "Audit Panel") of statisticians, voting experts, computer scientists and several of the nation's leading election officials. Following a review of the literature and extensive consultation with the Audit Panel, the Brennan Center and the Samuelson Clinic make several practical recommendations for improving post-election audits, regardless of the audit method that a jurisdiction ultimately decides to adopt

Landslide Denied: Exit Polls vs. Vote Count 2006

There was an unprecedented level of concern approaching the 2006 Election ("E2006") about the vulnerability of the vote counting process to manipulation. With questions about the integrity of the 2000, 2002 and 2004 elections remaining unresolved, with e-voting having proliferated nationwide, and with incidents occurring with regularity through 2005 and 2006, the alarm spread from computer experts to the media and the public at large. It would be fair to say that America approached E2006 with held breath.For many observers, the results on Election Day permitted a great sigh of relief -- not because control of Congress shifted from Republicans to Democrats, but because it appeared that the public will had been translated more or less accurately into electoral results, not thwarted as some had feared. There was a relieved rush to conclude that the vote counting process had been fair and the concerns of election integrity proponents overblown.Unfortunately the evidence forces us to a very different and disturbing conclusion: there was gross vote count manipulation and it had a great impact on the results of E2006, significantly decreasing the magnitude of what would have been, accurately tabulated, a landslide of epic proportions. Because much of this manipulation appears to have been computer-based, and therefore invisible to the legions of at-the-poll observers, the public was informed of the usual "isolated incidents and glitches" but remains unaware of the far greater story: The electoral machinery and vote counting systems of the United States did not honestly and accurately translate the public will and certainly can not be counted on to do so in the future

Elektronik Oy Verme Sistemlerinde Guvenlik: Deneyimler ve Turkiye Icin Oneriler

Electronic voting systems are no longer a theoretical matter and they have been successfully used in elections and referendums in some countries. With such systems some problems of paper ballots can be eliminated easily. However, these systems have their own security problems. In this article, first an evaluation of the India, Brazil and Venezuela examples within the context of the criteria for voting systems for just elections is made. Next, some suggestions about the electronic voting systems and the voting process that can be used for a secure and problem free manner application of such systems are proposed.Electronic voting systems, security, ballot, multiple vote, wholesale fraud, retail fraud, NP-completeness, Mercuri Method.

Verifiable Electronic Voting System: An Open Source Solution

Elections, referenda and polls are vital processes for the operation of a modern democracy. They form the mechanism for transferring power from citizens to their representatives. Although some commentators claim that the pencil-and-paper systems used in countries such as Canada and UK are still the best method of avoiding voterigging, recent election problems, and the need for faster, better, cheaper vote counting, have stimulated great interest in managing the election process through the use of electronic voting systems. While computer scientists, for the most part, have been warning of the possible perils of such action, vendors have forged ahead with their products, claiming increased security and reliability. Many democracies have adopted electronic systems, and the number of deployed systems is rising. Although the electronic voting process has gained popularity and users, it is a great challenge to provide a reliable system. The existing systems available to perform the election tasks are far from trustworthy. In this paper we describe VEV (Verifiable E-Voting), an electronic voting system which is opne, but also provides for secret and secure voting, and can be used and verified over existing network system

Restoring the Right to Vote

The right to vote forms the core of American democracy. Our history is marked by successful struggles to expand the franchise, to include those previously barred from the electorate because of race, class, or gender. As a result our democracy is richer, more diverse, and more representative of the people than ever before. There remains, however, one significant blanket barrier to the franchise. 5.3 million American citizens are not allowed to vote because of a felony conviction. As many as 4 million of these people live, work and raise families in our communities, but because of a conviction in their past they are still denied the right to vote

Design Deficiencies and Lost Votes

In 2010, tens of thousands of votes in New York did not count due to overvotes -- the invalid selection of more than one candidate. This report demonstrates how the lack of adequate overvote protections disproportionately affected the state's poorest communities, suggests commonsense reforms, and examines national implications

On Estimating the Size and Confidence of a Statistical Audit

We consider the problem of statistical sampling for auditing elections, and we develop a remarkably simple and easily-calculated upper bound for the sample size necessary for determining with probability at least c whether a given set of n objects contains b or more “bad” objects. While the size of the optimal sample drawn without replacement can be determined with a computer program, our goal is to derive a highly accurate and simple formula that can be used by election officials equipped with only a simple calculator

Collaborative Public Audit of the November 2006 General Election

We hope that this Audit Report will assist the Ohio Secretary of State, all Ohio local Boards of Election, election reform organizations, and other election officials nationwide in seeing how an independent audit process can be created and function at the local level. Additionally, we hope the public will recognize that this Report contains the kind of information that all election administrative agencies need to better achieve the public charge for producing accurate election results and to facilitate sound improvements in election administrative practices

Modeling and Analyzing Faults to Improve Election Process Robustness

This paper presents an approach for continuous process improvement and illustrates its application to improving the robustness of election processes. In this approach, the Little-JIL process definition language is used to create a precise and detailed model of an election process. Given this process model and a potential undesirable event, or hazard, a fault tree is automatically derived. Fault tree analysis is then used to automatically identify combinations of failures that might allow the selected potential hazard to occur. Once these combinations have been identified, we iteratively improve the process model to increase the robustness of the election process against those combinations that seem the most likely to occur. We demonstrate this approach for the Yolo County election process. We focus our analysis on the ballot counting process and what happens when a discrepancy is found during the count. We identify two single points of failure (SPFs) in this process and propose process modifications that we then show remove these SPFs