CHAPTER 2

FOREIGN LITERATURE

“Electronic Voting Literature”
Voting on the internet using PC's everyday offers only weak security, but its main disadvantages are in the areas of anonymity and protection against coercion and/or vote selling. The Presidential elections of 2000 brought national attention to problems with current American methods of casting and counting votes in public elections. Most people believe that the current system should be changed; there is much disagreement on how such changes should be made.
Dr. Michael Shamos of CMU provides a sharp counterpoint [6] to Neumann and Mercuri's views. While his “Six Commandments” summary of requirements for a voting system is very similar to others' requirements, he's less afraid of the catastrophic failures and sweeping fraud made possible by imperfections in electronic voting machines actually occurring in a real election. Shamos is also much less impressed with paper ballots than are Neumann and Mercuri. He places a great deal of faith in decentralization to make fraud difficult to commit and easy to detect. Dr. Shamos even likes DRE machines. (We must take into account the fact that this paper was written ten years ago, long before the 2000 elections and before more modern mathematical results like Chaum's; some of Dr. Shamos' opinions may have changed since then. While Dr. Neumann's talk cited here is of similar age, his pessimism with regard to machines has had little reason for change.)
Rebecca Mercuri invented the “Mercuri method” for electronic voting. A critical component of this method is very similar to the Caltech/MIT proposal: a voting machine must produce human-readable hardcopy paper results, which can be verified by the voter before the vote is cast, and manually recounted later if necessary. Her philosophy and Neumann's are very similar; in fact, they've written papers together on the