Elections Are Conceptually Trivial

After everyone has voted, the votes in each ballot position are counted, and the winner of each race is declared. Barring the use of some form of ranked-preference ballot, the algorithms required are hardly more than mere summations. What makes elections difficult is the problem of performing this summation over a canvassing hierarchy spanning many polling places and local election offices, where every single participant has a vested interest in the outcome. Complete trust cannot be extended to any single authority to run an honest election because every candidate for such trust may have a vested interest and may end up abusing that trust. Therefore, voting systems must be secured not only against improper actions by voters and election officials, but also against improper actions by programmers, technicians, and system administrators. The integrity of our elections is guarded by using two broad classes of defenses: The first involves an array of preventive measures; obvious examples include the requirement that voters identify themselves and the requirement that ballot boxes be locked and sealed during voting. The second line of defense involves auditing measures that detect error or fraud and, in the best case, allow reconstruction of the correct election totals despite these events. Canvassing an election is an accounting function, where votes, not currency, are the subject of the count. Consequently, election auditing resembles financial auditing. As with financial auditing, an audit can be initiated in response to suspicion of impropriety, but auditing is at its most effective as a deterrent to fraud and error if it is also conducted routinely. One key requirement of governmental elections vastly complicates the job of auditing: the requirement for a secret ballot. The details of this requirement vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and are weakened by the use of absentee ballots, but generally, voters are forbidden from retaining anything that could be used as proof of how they voted. This prevents the use of classic auditing tools such as the issuance of receipts, and severely curtails what may be retained in transaction logs. In some jurisdictions, ballot secrecy is not absolute: In Great Britain, for example, the Secret Ballot Act of 1872 requires that each ballot cast be tied to the voter who cast it by records that are held as a state secret [10]. Where such rules apply, auditing is easier than in jurisdictions where the right to a secret ballot is absolute, as in the U.S. In Iowa, for example, it is illegal for an election official to mark a ballot in a way that allows the voter to be identified [9]. BY Douglas W. Jones AUDITING