Two Faces of Electronic Voting

IEEEmember writes "The Swiss are claiming the world's first binding Internet vote in a national referendum. Voters were given lottery style scratch-off cards that allowed them to vote either by Internet, snail mail or in person. Internet votes can be cast from any computer accessing the elections site securely over the web. Electronic voting has been implemented to combat declining participation in elections. Stories from The Age, swissinfo and CBS available at Google News. The IEEE is calling attention to the current process for establishing standards for electronic voting. Project 1583 - Voting Equipment Standard and Project 1622 - Electronic Data Interchange are being developed by Standards Coordinating Committee 38 rather than being relegated to a single society to ensure the broad range of electronic voting issues can be addressed adequately. These standards are being written for use in the U.S. however some parties have shown an interest in extending them to other countries."

Comments

Verification

[sofakingon]

Two Words: Paper Trail.

There must be a verifiable, permanent, physical record in any election to ensure that any and all democratic elections are not tampered with.

Re:Verification

[Jerf]

However people who spout this act like you can't tamper with physical records. You can.

No, people who "spout" this think that it is much harder to systematically tamper with physical records than electronic records, and that this fact shows no signs of becoming less true any time soon.

Moreover, auditable electronic voting combines many of the nice parts of electronic voting with all of the nice parts of physical voting.

I think us "physically auditable voting"-type folks understand what is going on; it is exactly that understanding that has us calling for the hybrid, best-of-both-worlds solution, instead of the "God only knows what happened for sure" world of electronic-only voting.