NSF has just funded a new center (ACCURATE, how cute) for the study of electronic voting, to the tune of 7.5M.
JHU's Avi Rubin will direct the center.
Rubin told The (Baltimore) Sun he hopes the center will provide information in time for the 2008 presidential contest, but that its research will take longer.
Rubin has been an outspoken critic of computerized voting. In 2003, he co-authored a report that found voting machines from Diebold Elections Systems were vulnerable to hackers, multiple votes and vote-switching.
The
funding will be shared by a consortium which also includes Stanford, Rice University, and several other institutions.
"The basic question is how can we employ computer systems as trustworthy election systems when we know computers are not totally reliable, totally secure or bug- free," said Dan Wallach, associate professor of computer science at Rice, who will serve as associate director of ACCURATE. "In voting, this is complicated by the fact that potential adversaries include everyone from the voting system designers, elections officials and voters to political operatives, hackers and foreign agents."
In other news, North Carolina's state house just approved a paper trail plan, which now awaits the governor's signature:
With the 2006 elections, voting in North Carolina only will occur in the form of optical scan ballot machines, electronic recording machines or paper ballots counted by hand. Electronic machines would have to provide a paper copy of a voter's ballot, which could be corrected by the voter before they are recorded.
Hey, at least my vote will count in 2006.