Law Commons^™

Voting Technology And The Quest For Trustworthy Elections, S. Candice Hoke

S. Candice Hoke

This chapter reviews four dimensions of the still-unresolved voting technology quandary. It begins by briefly reviewing the Florida Bush v. Gore background that, combined with the tradition of state governmental control over election administration, spawned the contours and limitations of new federal regulatory apparatus. It also surveys some illustrative voting system malfunctions and their consequences surfacing predominantly from 2009–12.

The second part of this chapter, Federal Compulsion to Adopt Software-Based Voting Technologies, explains the misconceptions about software and digital equipment that led to both the flawed federal mandates and the ineffectual regulatory structure.

The third part of this chapter, Litigation …

E-Voting And Forensics: Prying Open The Black Box, Candice Hoke, Matt Bishop, Mark Graff, Sean Peisert, David Jefferson

S. Candice Hoke

Over the past six years, the nation has moved rapidly from punch cards and levers to electronic voting systems. These new systems have occasionally presented election officials with puzzling technical irregularities. The national experience has included unexpected and unexplained incidents in each phase of the election process: preparations, balloting, tabulation, and reporting results. Quick technical or managerial assessment can often identify the cause of the problem, leading to a simple and effective solution. But other times, the cause and scope of anomalies cannot be determined. In this paper, we describe the application of a model of forensics to the types …

Voting And Registration Technology Issues: Lessons From 2008, S. Candice Hoke, David Jefferson

S. Candice Hoke

This chapter reviews the 2008 election performance and scientific assessment records of the two major Help America Vote Act (HAVA) promoted election technologies considered here, the voting systems themselves and, to a lesser extent, the statewide voter-registration databases, to delineate both their performance records and the statutory and regulatory apparatus that produced the technological shift. Perhaps surprisingly, HAVA's role in generating each of these election technologies is quite different. While HAVA mandated and constituted the originating impetus for most of the statewide voter registration database systems that were in use for the 2008 election cycle, and provided major financial incentives …