on e-voting

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Stephen Unger <unger () cs columbia edu>
Date: January 15, 2007 3:57:46 PM EST
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Item for Interesting People

Dave,

Following is an abstract and URL for your IP list. It is an article I
wrote on e-voting. (I couldn't find any information on the list
website about how to submit an item.)

Best regards,

Steve
...........

Stephen H. Unger
Professor
Computer Science Department
Columbia University
............

                 E-VOTING: BIG RISKS FOR SMALL GAINS
                                  Stephen H. Unger, January 12, 2007

                       Abstract

E-voting is vulnerable to all the corruption techniques associated
with traditional elections based on strictly manual operations. In
addition, there is an open-ended collection of e-cheating methods that
can be implemented on a large scale by relatively few people, despite
well monitored election-day operations. Even under ideal conditions,
it would be extremely difficult to detect many of the conceivable
e-cheating methods. Furthermore, in addition to being grossly
inadequate, the testing and certification procedures prevalent today
in every state are frequently violated. Hence there is little
assurance that elections held under these conditions are generating
results corresponding to the actual votes cast. The ostensible
motivation for using e-voting stems largely from the dramatic 2000
election problems that were associated with punched card voting
systems. A better approach is to have teams of poll workers and poll
watchers manually count ballots manually marked by voters. This
simple, time-tested method, used in most industrialized countries
outside the US, seems to work very well. When did you last hear about
election fraud in Canada, Germany, or Sweden, for example? The
bottom-line argument is that there are no advantages of e-voting over
the manual approach that come anywhere near compensating for the great
increase in the likelihood of fraud and error.

For the full article see:
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~unger/articles/e-voting1-11-07.html

..............


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