Customer Reviews

Electronic Elections: The Perils and Promises of Digital Democracy

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This book, purporting to assess the risks of electronic voting technology, has neatly avoided or glossed over the most serious security issues. For example, no mention is made of the demonstrated "back door" hack attacks that succeeded in reprogramming central tabulator machines. The book completely ignored congressional testimony by computer programmer Clint Curtis, who admitted writing software to rig elections. It ignored the body of work produced by Bev Harris & co at Black Box Voting, showing weaknesses in the system from the machines themselves to the chain of custody of the vote to the public access to vote counting. It glossed over the exit poll discrepancies of 2004, incorrectly implying the discrepancies were uncorrelated with the use of electronic voting machines. In fact, the discrepancies were indeed correlated with electronic voting. The book reads like an info-mercial on behalf of Diebold!

If you have cause to be informed of issues surrounding present-day voting systems, then this book is certainly worthy of your attention, but you might want to take it with a grain of salt.

It correctly and importantly observes that concerns over the security of electronic voting systems have often caused us to embrace less secure options. In fact, although error and fraud are possible with any system, there is nothing in the data so far to suggest that electronic systems have suffered from a higher incidence of error and fraud than paper-based systems, nor is there reason to believe that the data is skewed. Nonetheless, I completed this book still in agreement with Alvarez's and Hall's critics (David Jefferson, et al.) that given time, attackers will inevitably develop the technology to make electronic voting increasingly vulnerable to undetectable outcome-changing fraud.

Speaking of security, the authors claim that we could effectively solve that problem by addressing secrecy and voter auditability simultaneously. But then, after dropping some tantalizing hints about cryptographic systems which achieve exactly that, such systems are practically excluded from the discussion. (The interested reader should search Wikipedia for "E2E".)

Critics of electronic voting will be disappointed to find that many of their arguments, in particular the argument that citizen involvement can make hand-counted paper ballots a non-black-box system, are not addressed head-on. To understand why such arguments do not withstand scrutiny, we have to turn to other sources[...].

But on the whole, the public would indeed be better served if this debate, which has been framed in terms of ideology and preconceived policy solutions, were instead focused on optimizing performance and risk, as we find here.