Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003

Good news on the electronic voting front. I thought I had mentioned the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003 before in this space, but apparently I had not. In any case, this bill, assuming it passes, should address all of the concerns about the auditability of electronic voting in time for the November 2004 general election.

As criticism of electronic voting systems heats up across the nation, three Republicans have signed on to support a bill that would force e-voting machines to produce a paper trail. Previously only Democrats had vowed to support the bill.

Republican congressmen Tom Davis of Virginia, Christopher Shays of Connecticut and New Hampshire's Charles Bass have agreed to co-sponsor the Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act of 2003, which was introduced to the House in May by Rush Holt (D-N.J.).

The bill would require electronic voting machines that currently don't offer a paper trail, such as touch-screen voting machines, to produce a receipt. The receipts would allow voters to verify that a machine recorded their vote correctly and would be used as an audit trail in case of a computer malfunction or other election irregularity.

There are currently 74 co-sponsors of the bill. Davis, Shays and Bass, however, are the first Republicans to sign on as co-sponsors. Davis is the former chair of the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee.

Congressman Holt said voter receipts should not be a partisan issue, as all parties should be concerned about the integrity of voting systems.

In other electronic voting news, David Chaum, noted cryptographer, inventor of eCash and founder of DigiCash (a mid-90's neighbor of mine at CWI/SARA in Amsterdam) has been working with other cryptographers in coming up with a very interesting way to provide voters with take-home receipts without the vote-selling concerns which have made this illegal in the past.

The new type of receipt is printed in two layers by a modified version of familiar receipt printers. You can read it clearly in the booth, but before leaving, you must separate the layers and choose which one to keep. Either one you take has the vote information you saw coded in it, but it cannot be read (except with numeric keys divided among computers run by election officials).

The half you take is supplied digitally by the voting machine for publication on an official election website. These posted receipts are the input to the process of making the final tally. A lotto-like draw selects points in the process that must be decrypted for inspection, but not so many points as to compromise privacy. Anyone with a PC can then use simple software to check all such decryptions published on the website and thereby verify that the final tally must be correct. Such audit cannot be fooled, no matter how many voting machines or other election computers are compromised or how clever or well-resourced the attack.