People will make incorrect claims about state, and especially national, laws about electronic voting,… In one local state or community, people could make some problem sound totally insolvable, when in fact it’s routinely solved in other places. Once you know that and have that perspective, it’s easier to get something done.
David Dill, Stanford University Computer Scientist, is the founder of Verified Voting. A timely article in the Stanford Daily contains some words of wisdom, as Connecticut advocates articulate the need to strengthen our audit law, while registrars protest the burdens of audits and the impossiblity of accurately counting votes by hand. <read>
“Transparency is a combination of two things: one of those things is being able to watch things happen, and the other is to be able to go back and check,” Dill said. “With electronic voting, from a computer science perspective, there’s no way to inspect the externals or internals of the machine or software and determine that it is accurate because it is too complicated to do by the means.”
[VerifiedVoting.org] points legislators to legislation passed in other states as models for appropriate verification mechanisms and addresses claims regarding the relative expense of paper ballots compared to electronic voting.Dill emphasized that the intersection of politics with complex technical challenges necessitates the involvement of technical experts like computer scientists and engineers in public policy debates.
