An Examination of Vote Verification Technologies: Findings and Experiences from the Maryland Study

We describe our findings and experiences from our technical review of vote verification systems for the Maryland State Board of Elections (SBE). The review included the following four systems for possible use together with Maryland’s existing Diebold AccuVote-TS (touch screen) voting system: VoteHere Sentinel; SCYTL Pnyx.DRE; MIT-Selker audio system; Diebold voter verified paper audit trail. As a baseline, we also examined the SBE’s procedures for “parallel testing” of its Diebold system. For each system, we examined how it enables voters who use touch screens to verify that their votes are cast as intended, recorded as cast, and reported as recorded. We also examined how well it permits post-election auditing. To this end, we considered implementation, impact on current state voting processes and procedures, impact on voting, functional completeness, security against fraud, attack and failure, reliability, accessibility, and voter privacy. 1 Support for this research was provided in part by the Maryland State Board of Elections. For our full report, see Norris, et al. [Nor06a, Nor06b]. Our principal findings are, first, that each system we examined may at some point provide a degree of vote verification beyond what is available through the Diebold System as currently implemented, provided the system were fully developed, fully integrated with the Diebold system, and effectively implemented. Second, none of the systems is yet a fully developed, commercially ready product. This interdisciplinary study—the first of its kind—is of interest for the way in which it evaluates the systems, for the technical questions it raises about standard interfaces, and as a snapshot of the state of vote verification technologies and their commercial development.