Saturday, May 31, 2008

ATMs can fail, too

It isn't just voting machines. If ordinary bank ATMs can be made secure and reliable, why can't electronic voting machines? It's a simple enough question, but unfortunately the answer isn't. Secure voting, unfortunately, is a much more complex technical problem than electronic banking, not least because a democratic election's dual requirements for ballot secrecy and transparent auditability are often in tension with one another in the computerized environment. Making ATMs robust and resistan