A federally funded center dedicated to
improving the reliability and trustworthiness
of voting technology,
drawing on experts in computer science,
public policy and human behavior, will be
based at The Johns Hopkins University, the
National Science Foundation announced
Aug. 15. Researchers from five other institutions
nationwide will participate in the
project, which is aimed at addressing public
concerns about the growing use of electronic
voting machines in local, state and national
elections.
The NSF said it would provide $7.5
million over five years to launch the new
endeavor called ACCURATE, which is
short for A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable,
Auditable, and Transparent Elections.
Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science
at Johns Hopkins and technical director of
the university’s Information Security Institute,
will direct the center.
Rubin has received international attention
in recent years for identifying risks associated
with computer-based voting technology
that has been put into use with minimal
scrutiny by independent security experts.
He has testified before state and federal lawmakers
and election supervisors regarding
potential security flaws in these machines.
The center’s work will be important
because of dramatic changes taking place
in the way in which people cast ballots.
Fueled by significant funding from the Help
America Vote Act of 2002, municipal and
county governments across the nation are in
the midst of the largest conversion of U.S.
voting technology in a century. With this
move, the percentage of U.S. voters casting
ballots on electronic voting machines is
expected to rise from 13 percent in 2000 to
a much higher percentage in 2008. This is
occurring despite persistent questions from
leading security experts, legal scholars and
computer scientists about the integrity and
trustworthiness of e-voting. In some states,
technology glitches in recent elections have
led to calls for mandatory paper trails and
stricter standards for electronic systems.
"Our country moved to electronic voting
in public elections before the technology
was ready,” Rubin said. "This center will
develop the fundamental science necessary
for secure, accessible, trustworthy and transparent
voting.”
The NSF grant is expected to provide
approximately $1.2 million to Johns Hopkins
to fund Rubin’s research into voting
technology and for administration of the
new center. Also participating in ACCURATE
will be prominent researchers from
Rice University; Stanford University; the
University of California, Berkeley; the University
of Iowa; and SRI International.
Some members of the multidisciplinary
team will study electronic voting hardware
and programming, including the cryptography
used to ensure voters’ selections remain
private and the methods used to verify that
computers accurately compile all legitimate
votes. These researchers will also look for
ways to guard against a variety of election tampering
threats.
"The basic question is how can we employ
computer systems as trustworthy election
systems when we know computers are not
totally reliable, totally secure or bug-free?”
said Dan Wallach, associate professor of
computer science at Rice, who will serve
as associate director of ACCURATE. "In
voting, this is complicated by the fact that
potential adversaries include everyone from
the voting system designers, elections officials
and voters to political operatives, hackers
and foreign agents.”
Other team members will focus on legal
and public policy issues that have received
little attention in the rapid transition to
electronic voting, as well as human behavior
questions tied to the abrupt change in
the way people are being required to cast
their ballots. A key issue is how confident
people will feel that their electronic vote
was recorded accurately.
The team’s findings will be made public
and will be used to help develop technical
standards and proposals for new e-voting
systems that are easy to use and tamper-evident.
"There is no reason why computers cannot
be used to improve election systems,
but it has to be done right,” center director
Rubin said. "Our research will focus on
leveraging the best properties of different
technologies to design the strongest overall
system. ACCURATE has a unique opportunity
to produce groundbreaking scientific
research while at the same time helping to
protect our democracy.”
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