Book Review: Avi Rubin's "Brave New Ballot"

As Freddie Oakley put it to me, "Who wouldda thunk Avi could write a page-turner about life through the looking glass in Electionland." That's exactly what Avi Rubin has done with his new book, Brave New Ballot (Morgan Road Books, A Division of Random House ISBN: 0767922107). Not only is it a fascinating, personal story, but it strives to make highly technical subjects accessible to those that might not have a technical background.

Avi, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University and director of ACCURATE, occupies a unique position in the e-voting saga. He wasn't the first scientist to critically look at voting machinery; however, the report that he co-authored with Tadayoshi Kohno, Adam Stubblefield, and Dan Wallach in the summer of 2003, "Analysis of an Electronic Voting System", sparked a firestorm. Metaphorically speaking, this book tells how Avi's team looked under the hood of a BMW and found a Yugo, and how the resulting activity was exciting, exhausting, frustrating and, at times, absurd.

To me, the most interesting aspect of Avi's book is the combination of all the people involved and their perspectives, interpolitics and tensions. All constituencies involved in the electronic voting tug of war are represented in his narrative and it is really neat to see how they all fit into the story. Avi shows that he understands all of these perspectives, but, in the end, that we can't do much with voting machinery that is fundamentally and systemically flawed by design and implementation.

Buy this book; tell your friends.