I participate in various computer industry standards. One major organization where such work takes place is The "Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards" or OASIS.
I haven't participated in this particular work group (called a Technical Committee), but they've been creating the "Election Markup Language" (EML). Their charter starts with the goal:
To develop a standard for the structured interchange of data among hardware, software, and service providers who engage in any aspect of providing election or voter services to public or private organizations.
Info on their work can be found here.
They've just put version 4 of EML out for a public review in preparation to get it standardized.
More afer the flip...
The group started in 2001 and has members from vendors like IBM, Sun, Oracle, Accenture (no Diebold!), government (both the UK and US), and individuals.
The Council of Europe Ministers have endorsed its use and an earlier version was piloted in 2003 in the UK. Others are planning to do so as well. The US is involved in the work, but I haven't yet found anything on plans to mandate this in the US yet, but I've just started looking into it.
I've perused some of their email archives and documents. It's pretty interesting stuff. There is a presentation available at Trusted-Logic-Voting-Systems-with-EML40 (pdf) with a needs slide up front stating:
Trusted Logic Voting Needs
- How can we ensure the voting machine does not cheat on the human operator who cannot "see inside"?
- How can we know that every vote is counted as cast?
- If you have two parties that you cannot trust, how do you create a process that works between the two - in a way that if either cheats you will know?
- How can you create an audit trail that allows 100% crosschecking while keeping voter privacy?
- Use existing work in the field on multi-party trusted logic process (e.g. MIT approach using the "Frog Principle"*)
and a slide about trust:
Core Trust Principles
- Verifiable paper ballots
- Matched e-Vote electronic records
- Electoral roll of voter participation
- Private and anonymous
- Secure 100% tallying and crosschecking
- Easy for citizens to understand
- Uses secure open source computer system
It appears the US government is (slowly) getting behind this, although it does take considerable time to implement, pilot, and deploy such work. But the fact that they're committed to verifiable paper ballots and the use of secure, open source computer systems gives me hope that we will bring accountability to our election process over time.
In the meantime, we all need to continue to push hard for election reform.