The Future of Voting

Despite heated debate about the security and accessibility of voting technology, at the end of the day all sides agree that they want better voting systems. But what will the voting systems of the future look like?

At this ITIF Forum, the lead scientists of two of the most innovative voting systems unveil their research and provide attendees the opportunity to participate in hands-on demonstrations of their technology. These voting systems represent the latest advances in voting system security and accessibility.

The first voting system is Prime III, a secure, multimodal electronic voting system that takes a usable security approach to address security, trust and ease of use. The Prime III system has been referred to as the “Wal-mart of electronic voting” because everyone votes on the same machine equally. “It’s one stop voting for everyone. If you can’t see, hear, read or if you have a physical disability, you can still vote on Prime III.” Prime III also uses a unique voter-verified video audit trail (VVVAT) to ensure that all elections can be fully audited.

The second voting system is Scantegrity, a successor to Punchscan, the first voting system to offer fully independent end-to-end verification of election results. Punchscan is also the grand prize winner of the 2007 International Voting System competition VoComp.

In addition, Dr. Alec Yasinsac presents an overview of the Okaloosa Distance Balloting Pilot, sponsored by the Operation BRAVO Foundation. In the 2008 presidential election, approximately 2 million overseas military and civilian voters will be effectively unable to vote because of the slow and unreliable vote-by-mail process. The goal of this pilot project is to develop a reliable remote electronic voting solution for these voters.

The forum concludes with a lengthy Q&A session where participants are encouraged to play the role of a hacker and ask “what if” questions.

Handouts

• Operation BRAVO: Presentation Slides
• Operation BRAVO: Technical Overview
• Prime III: Presentation Slides
• Scantegrity: Presentation Slides
• Scantegrity: Sample Ballot