Realities of E-voting Security

E lectronic voting has been around since the 1970s, but until the US’s 2000 Gore-Bush presidential election, it was largely out of the public eye. After the Florida punched-card debacle, it became clear that our election infrastructure needed renovation. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 mandated a solution of sorts, making US$3 billion available to states to move away from their long-lived, well-understood voting processes in the name of election accuracy. Soon thereafter, e-voting came under tremendous scrutiny for its potential to improve electoral precision as well as for its potential security pitfalls.1