Indian EVM compared with Diebold

Good read, and not too "techie" for those of you who aren't cyber-geeks like myself.

http://techaos.blogspot.com/2004/05/indian-evm-compared-with-diebold.html

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Last few months have brought very serious discussions on the Net regarding the use of Electronic Voting, and the security of it. In the USA, the saga related to Diebold and its opposition is well known. I do not know the electoral process in the United States, but I attempt here to compare the Technology used by the Indian Election commission and the Diebold AccuVote system. I present here the Information I have about the Indian system, and the information about Diebold got from the web.

Reading this article, some of you might remember that Cold war era joke, about NASA and its multi million dollar experiment with a pen that can write in micro gravity to solve the writing problems of astronauts, and the Russian solution of using a Pencil to solve the same problem. IMHO, the Diebold system is too complex for a simple and straight forward task such as voting. Windows CE, Modems, PCMCIA storage cards, Touch screen GUI, On-screen writing facility, Voice-guidance system, multiple language UI, DES Encryption, centralized voting Server, a step-by-step wizard to cast a vote, Microsoft SQL Server to store votes, Backup servers etc. are all unnecessary. All geeks know that a smaller and simple system is more secure, more code means more cost, more chances for bugs, more threats to security. You cannot make a system that is “guaranteed” as secure. A lot depends on the electoral process and the integrity of election officials.
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more to read...

There are real problems with this system, though it's an excellent stopgap solution.

First, understand: this isn't a computerized voting system. I'm not saying that, itself, is a problem (quite the contrary) but there are a lot of things that states have indicated their desire to do, that it cannot do. It doesn't readily let people with various handicaps vote secretly, or work in multiple languages. It can't accomodate more sophisticated voting methods like instant-runoff. And for many an american election, you'd find you needed a hundred buttons. The voter doesn't have a chance to correct mistakes.

Second, the system has no real audit capability. The importance of this is frequently underestimated. No system is absolutely secure. (In the case of this one, it's vulnerable to anyone who can tamper with the insides of the machine, or who rewrites the names-to-buttons key so people don't vote for who they think they're voting for.) Given that, building an unauditable system is the equivalent of putting all your money in a safe, and then leaving the safe out in a public park all night. It may be a very, very good safe. But people are free to try to crack it without much of a risk of getting caught; sooner or later someone will succeed.

Adding an audit is like posting a guard to patrol the park. Now, someone may come up with a way to crack the safe, but they also run the entirely separate risk of being caught by the guard. This totally changes the thief's risk-reward calculation. In voting machines, the guard is a voter-verified paper ballot. With electronic voting electronically secured, and paper voting physically secured, a would-be cheat has two separate systems he needs to defeat.

India, of course, would face enormous financial and logistical challenges implementing such a system correctly. Theirs is a good alternative solution for their situation. The US doesn't have this problem. We should advocate the best possible method of voting, and it's quite clear what that is.