+ Slide 38

Part of a talk delivered at Cornell College, Jan 8, 2004
by Douglas W. Jones
THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA Department of Computer Science

 

What We Could Have Done

 

Redundant Vote Recording

Electronic voting systems "shall maintain an electronic or physical image of each ballot, in an independent data path"

    Section 3.2.4.5 of the 1990 FEC/NASED standard

No vendor has ever produced a system that actually did this!

No examiner or auditor has ever demanded that this be done!

    Genuinely independent data paths are difficult to build;
    this would mean parallel computer systems independently
    monitoring the touch screen and independently recording
    and interpreting each user action.

    Genuinely independence would require that the software
    on each data path share no common components or
    authorship.

This would return to the biblical standard of two witnesses!

Today's systems use redundancy only for fault tolerance!