justanyone's Journal: Specifications for a eVoting system

This was in reference to the eVoting software story developed in Australia.

I see the following as requirements for voting software system:

1. An easily auditable paper trail of physical paper ballots, one per voter.

2. An audit of the vote should include the ability for an unaided human eye to quickly and easily determine:
a. each selection chosen for each race (be it a person or yes/no for ballot initiatives);
b. the number of the machine that produced the ballot

3. No machine-printed proof of who people voted for should be provided to or available to any voter upon leaving a polling place. Otherwise, people could be paid for their votes, or compelled to vote a specific way.

4. No method should be avaible to associate a specific person with which ballot selections they made.

5. No method of altering a completed ballot should be available to anyone in the polling station before, during, or after the election.

6. A method should exist to determine if a ballot was tampered with after it was cast.

7. A method should exist to prevent ballot-box-stuffing. This method should determine if an invalid ballot was introduced after voting was finished.

8. The voter should be able to easily verify if the ballot corresponds to their choices.

9. The machinery should be incapable of producing invalid ballots, such as ones where two selections are made for the same race.

10. The machinery should alert the voter of an 'UNDERVOTE': if they are about to cast a ballot that does not include choices for all the races. However, since an 'undervote' is legal and valid, it should be easy for a voter to approve of a ballot that is an undervote ballot. Not every voter wants to make a choice on every single race.

11. Voters should have the option to select 'all democratic candidates' or 'all republican candidates' (like wise for any party) as an initial option, and override this choice for any specific race. For instance, say republicans R1, R2, and R3 are running against democrats D1, D2, and D3. The voter can pick 'all democrats' and the machine notes they've chosen D1, D2, and D3. Then, the voter should be able override choice D2 with R2 and not affect the other D1 and D3 choices. This speeds the voting process for many people and allows fair choices in cases where they disagree with only one candidate from their party.

12. The machine should be able to present voters with only those races for which they are eligible to vote. This should present minimal hassle for the voter. Some voting locations serve multiple jurisdictions and thus those people who vote there should be able to easily know whether their dwelling place is in the are in the Nth state congressional district and Mth federal congressional district and X township school board districts.

13. The machinery and systems should allow hearing impaired people fully operate the systems relying only on visible signs.

14. The machinery and systems should allow visually impaired people to vote. Ideally, they would be able to do this without assistance. Also ideally, they would be able to verify their vote by using a Braille paper ballot.

15. Non-English speaking people should be able to chose their preferred language and see that language along with english on the ballots that are printed out for their review.

15. The system should be operable in the case of a power failure. By preference, this means that a backup voting system of normal paper ballots should be pre-printed and available for use by anyone and everyone should some the electrical supply to the polling station be interrupted during voting hours.

16. Any system (including a backup system) that includes the ability to make a mark on a piece of paper with a pen/pencil should not have as a requirement the differentiation between circles, stars, dots, slashies, etc., i.e., a person circling the name of their candidate instead of marking an X in the box next to their name should not be disenfranchised (denied the right to vote).

17. No balloting system should use the perforation of a piece of paper as an indication.

18. All text on a computer screen should appear between a minimum font size and a maximum font size, in a generally recognizable font (standardized) with a minimum amount of (preferabbly no) serifs.

19. No networking of voting booth computer terminals should be either required or allowed. If networking were permitted, someone would be able to modify or view the software before, during, and/or immediately after the vote. Further, if a clock was in the room and the voting area were videotaped, someone could use that to determine how a specific voter voted. Thus, no timestamps should be attached to a ballot before that ballot is counted/accepted into the ballot box.

20. The voting terminals should indicate at any point how many votes it has printed out.