[130984] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Voting machine security
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul Hoffman)
Mon Aug 18 14:50:20 2008
In-Reply-To: <20080818162433.8E2D254377C@kilo.rtfm.com>
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:16:02 -0700
To: cryptography mailing list <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
From: Paul Hoffman <paul.hoffman@vpnc.org>
At 9:24 AM -0700 8/18/08, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>(and because of the complexity of US elections,
>hand counting is quite expensive)
This is quite disputable. Further, hand vs. machine counting is core
to the way we think about the security of the voting system.
On a "complex" ballot, there are maybe 20 races or propositions, some
of which may allow multiple votes per race. The pre-electronic method
for hand-counting these was to start with race #1, have one person
reading each vote out load from a large stack of ballots, and another
person tabulating. In most districts, this is done twice with
different people doing the counting and, often, those people coming
from the "opposite party" in our wonderful two-party system.
The numbers I saw in the late 1970's said that each vote took 2.5
seconds per ballot per race when done slowly; so that's 5 seconds
when run twice. Per "complex" ballot, that's about 100 seconds, or
roughly 2 minutes, or roughly 1/30 of an hour. At current labor rates
of $12/hour for this type of work (that's high, but we want qualified
people to count), that means it costs about US$0.40 per ballot for a
complex ballot.
Essentially no one would argue that is is "quite expensive". I
suspect that nearly everyone in the country would be happy to pay an
additional $1/election for more reliable results.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium
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