WORKSHOP ON DEVELOPING A RESEARCH AGENDA FOR ELECTRONIC
VOTING TECHNOLOGIES
September 17-18, 2004
Convened by the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Main | Program | Participants | Synopses
Thad Hall
RESEARCH AGENDA FOR ELECTRONIC VOTING
Summary
Electronic voting should be interpreted here as broadly as possible to include registration, voting, and the long-term data storage of results. With that in mind, there are two broad issues associated with electronic technologies and elections that should be a focus of research:
1. What are the administrative processes and procedures necessary to transition to and implement an electronic system? How electronic systems change the responsibilities, workflows and operations in poll sites, local election offices, and at the state level?
2. What model should be used to identify and quantify the risks associated
with various forms of election technology and how should appropriate mitigation
strategies be selected? Importantly, are these risks solely the providence of
electronic voting systems, or do they also exist in new, untested, uncertified
voter registration systems?
Research Issues
First, the transition to and implementation of electronic election systems has raised an array of questions. Some of these questions surround issues of the accessibility of various systems and, in the case of voting systems, the residual vote rates that accompany them in a given jurisdiction. Many of these questions have been studied or are being studied by scholars across the country.
However, the technological component of these new systems is just that, a component. Their implementation is accompanied by a series of processes and procedures that tell all of the actors in the implementation what they are to do, when, and how. However, little consideration has been to examining the way in which state and local election officials adopt new processes and procedures to accommodate new electronic technologies (if they do so at all). It is also not clear that all states and localities have the same implementation capacities-for example, we might expect larger counties and smaller counties to have various strengths and weaknesses in the implementation of an electronic voting machine or a new voter registration system and to need different types of support from the state to achieve their goal. Additionally, the state's relationship with election vendors is likely to change as technology changes, and the state will need different organizational capacities to manage this new relationship.
The combination of process, procedure, and capacity could dramatically affect both the short-term and long-term success in implementing electronic systems. Answering questions about this essentially implementation question requires conducting both case analyses of successful and unsuccessful implementations of electronic voting, as well as collection of cross-sectional and time series data on an array of election administration variables in counties, cities, and states. These would include information on governance, technological, and human resources capacities in these jurisdictions.
Second, the current debate over electronic voting and voting technology generally is hindered by the lack of a clear and coherent risk assessment model. Fortunately, risk assessment is something that government, business, and the sciences have to address regularly, and there are models that can be employed to analyze the electronic voting case. One research question is then what risk assessment models are most applicable to elections-especially electronic voting-and what is the most effective process for implementing these models for elections. Often these models include factors such as: (a) identification and analysis of threats through a threat-risk assessment, (b) mitigation of threats through procedures and design, (c) implementation of system within the context of the model, (d) collection of forensic data on implementation, and (e) updating of threat-risk assessment on the basis of the forensics and changes in the implementation environment.
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