David Wagner Responds To Question From House Committees

[Wilms]

David Wagner Responds To Question From House Committees

By David Wagner, Computer Science Division, University of California, Berkeley

September 12, 2006

The following responses to were provided to written questions for the record submitted by Chairman Ehlers and Chairman Boehlert to Dr. David Wagner after the joint hearing of the Science and House Administration Committees held on July 19, 2006. Questions from Democratic members of the Science Committee follow.

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I recommend sweeping changes to how the 2005 Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines (VVSG) deal with security, to bring them up to date with fundamental changes over the past decade in how voting systems are built. The 2007 VVSG are in the process of being drafted, and I propose several suggestions for consideration.

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Make all reports from the testing labs public. Today, the results from the federal testing labs are not made available to the public. The labs consider them proprietary and the property of the vendor. If a system fails to gain the testing lab’s approval, this fact is not disclosed to anyone other than the vendor who paid for the testing.

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This situation is truly unfortunate. However, this is the case for all currently available voting technologies, whether they print a paper record or not. If the machine prints nothing, then the blind voter still cannot independently verify that their vote has been recorded correctly on electronic storage. To put it another way, with paperless voting machines, neither sighted voters nor blind voters have any chance to independently verify their vote; with voter-verified paper records, sighted voters can independently verify their vote, but blind voters cannot.

Voter-verified paper records do not make the independent verification problem any worse for blind voters; they just fail to make things better.

The policy question is whether it is valuable to improve security and reliability for most voters, even if there are some voters who are not helped by these measures (but are not harmed by them, either) and remain without any means of independent verification.

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