Electronic Voting and What Should be Done Essay -- essays research pap

There’s been a lot of talk about this new computer system that casts election votes. Ideally, using electronic equipment has many advantages but there are disadvantages hiding in the cave ready to attack. We’ve all seen electronic equipment often work as expected but more importantly, it’s not uncommon for electronic equipment to fail and when this sort of concept is applied to voting, miscounting is simply unacceptable. I think the best way to solve this type problem is to try to make the voting machines work without fail but to never assume it won’t fail. As we’ve seen from the arrogance of the engineers of the Titanic or from the 2004 New York Yankees, just because it looks and sounds workable, we should never assume these machines will do what it should. By this, I don’t mean the system should fail completely but we should design the system to constantly self-check itself to insure no errors have been made. In addition, the system should friendly so that at least at the user point-of-view, there should not be problems with confusion or misinterpretation. Overall, making an e-voting system work requires the engineer to consider the logical, defensive (security against hacking) and personal standpoint of design and do so in a sensitive, introspective manner. First and foremost, the system should be ethical. What this means is the system should be created to an acceptable and mainstream protocol. Ethics means different things to different people but we can’t satisfy all of these morals that people have all on one system since some might contradict one another so we need to decide on what the majority would find acceptable. Right off the bat, it’s important to prevent hacker attacks because people want a fair election and not a tailored one. We go to vote to voice our opinion and not that of someone else. Secondly, it’s important to let the public know what these voting machines do and how they’re secured, letting the public know that the e-voting companies care about their security and that these voting machines are engineered with exhaustive research on how to keep it secure. Lastly, the user interface, the user interface should be unbiased (it shouldn’t look like the one candidate is better than the ot her). Another thing about the user interface is that it should be easy to understand as to not intimidate voters. I think there also should be the option t... ...oting systems should use tickets, or signatures that identify each voter uniquely and each vote should be logged with user token in memory so that the voter can’t vote twice. Although, any security measure isn’t entirely secure from clever hackers, keeping security very strict would prevent many attempts. Once you’ve voted from an e-voting machine and somehow passed all the security that was involved I think it would be appropriate to give the user a receipt showing exactly what was stored in memory because like I said early, we should never assume everything will work and if the voter can verify by eye what was stored then this would allow corrections if needed. In addition this type of system could be used for hand recounts or to check user errors which would probably be 90% of all the complaints given that the programming was planned properly. Yes, it may be possible for deceiving information to be printed out, making the vote look correct but if all the aforementioned methods of checking, security, and logging and provided that everything was executed well, an electronic problem to this point should be very rare. Comparatively, this should be no more secure than paper ballots.