An Examination of the Auditability of Voter Verified An Examination of the Auditability of Voter Verified

2007 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop

Stephen N. Goggin ; Michael D. Byrne

Others  :  http://www.usenix.org/events/evt07/tech/full_papers/goggin/goggin.pdf
PID  :  47325

来源: CEUR

【 摘 要 】

With heightened concerns over the security of electronic voting machines, 37 states now require some form of voter verification mechanism that could then be used in a recount. This usually takes the form of a Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT). Unfortunately, little is known about the usability of VVPATs for recount purposes. The current study examines the speed and accuracy of hand recounts of VVPATs. Participants counted completed VVPAT ballots which were based on those actually in use in DREs today. Two races from of a spool of 120 ballots were manually counted, which includes separating ballots from the spool and removing rejected ballots. This task was time-consuming and prone to high error rates, with only 57.5% of participants’ counts providing the correct election results. Furthermore, ballot rejection rate interacted with the closeness of the race being counted; high rejection rate paired with a small margin of victory resulted in a particularly high error rate. This experiment raises serious concerns about the viability of conducting manual recounts or audits using current VVPAT technology.