Honest Voting

What an impressive acronym!

[Cut to visual of author running outdoors to vomit into the potted palms. Haven’t we all had enough of these? Good day to you, acronyms! …I said, Good Day!]

Sorry, I’m back now. These bursts of acronym fatigue attack you right out of the blue.

No matter how painfully engineered its acronym, ACCURATE nevertheless has noble goals. Created in 2005 with a $7.5 million award from the National Science Foundation, ACCURATE is part of NSF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate’s CyberTrust program, a multi-year initiative that seeks to make the nation’s underlying computer networks and infrastructures reliable even in the face of cyber attacks.* Their roster of principal investigators and advisory board members would be hard to equal — or confound, I hope.

On May 5th ACCURATE submitted public comment to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on the commission’s draft Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG), urging the Commission to adopt certain key features for the draft. (The VVSG provides a national certification framework for U.S. voting systems against which 40 states require their voting systems to be certified.)

ACCURATE particularly applauds the requirement for software independence, which would require voting systems to be designed so that undetected flaws in the voting system software cannot cause changes in the vote count. Hard to argue against that in principle. However, when I think about critical software design I’m inescapably reminded of an old friend, a programmer who wrote software on contract under the usual conditions of pull-an-all-nighter, chug-Mountain-Dew-till-your-eyes-bug-out, do-you-want-it-right-or-do-you-want-it-Tuesday. One day somebody told him, “Hey, we used your compiler in our fighter plane navigation system!” He said thanks, but inwardly he couldn’t help thinking, “Wow, I hope they’re not using those floating-point routines.” In other words, when it comes to having results not affected by software flaws, well, you can ask… At this stage of the game, I’m willing to settle for just plugging the loopholes we already know about.

When you track back from the EAG guidelines to the Voting Systems Center page, by the way, you can almost see your face reflected in its ultra-clean design. Unfortunately, the voting system guidelines they recommend are still voluntary. That’s the bad news; the good news is that the government is funding the testing at all. There’s a lot more to be said about voting system testing done through the EAC, and I’ll say at least some of it down the line.

*First source for this information: an article in the Carlsbad Current-Argus.

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