Public Policy Mechanisms for Increasing Transparency in Electronic Voting

I’ll be giving my PhD thesis talk in 202 South Hall (UC Berkeley) on 5/14 (Wed) at 10am. Abstract below...

Public Policy Mechanisms for Increasing Transparency in Electronic Voting

Joseph Lorenzo Hall, UC Berkeley School of Information

Abstract:

In the early years of the American republic, only white male landowners could vote, and then typically by expressing their preferences in a public setting, for all to witness. Our electoral system has changed drastically since that time; now almost all Americans cast votes with the assistance of computerized equipment. While much good stems from the use of computerized equipment in elections---notably increased efficiency, enfranchisement and flexibility---unintended consequences of this mechanization have left us with complicated, insecure and opaque voting systems.

My PhD thesis focuses on the issue of transparency in e-voting; that is, what public policy mechanisms can serve to make our voting systems less opaque? After exploring what we mean by “governmental transparency”, I examine the question of e-voting transparency on three fronts. I analyze the role of disclosed and open source software in election systems and conclude that, while fully disclosed source code is a valid goal, limited disclosure to experts serves many of the same goals in the short-term while preserving vendor trade secrecy. I investigate how contractual provisions between local election jurisdictions and voting system vendors serve to frustrate transparency and find that election officials need to be more careful in these negotiations. Finally, I turn to the question of auditing black box elections systems; that is, since we cannot know how these systems work in the full-disclosure (“white box”) case, possibly because of contractual provisions that limit investigation, what methods and procedures can we use for “checking the math“ behind our elections?