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Brave New Ballot review

6.5

Editors' Rating

Wendy M Grossman ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 02 Feb 2007

London mayor Ken Livingstone once wrote a book called If Voting Changed Anything, They'd Abolish It. But why abolish it if you can rig the voting machines? In Brave New Ballot: The Battle to Safeguard Democracy in the Age of Electronic Voting, Johns Hopkins computer scientist Aviel Rubin makes the case against Direct Recording Electronic voting machines. It is, he and most computer security experts argue, impossible to be sure that a machine's code is secure and fraud-proof, that it has not been tampered with, and that it has not been programmed in subtle ways to commit election fraud. True, paper systems are also imperfect. But it is, as he says, the difference between wholesale and retail fraud.

Paper is retail: it might be easy to interfere with a single ballot or polling place, but it's difficult to commit fraud on any large scale when election counts rely on many polling places and many ballot boxes. DRE is wholesale: it's comparatively difficult to rewrite voting machine software — but if you can, that software can end up being deployed on every machine in the country.

Rubin's public involvement in e-voting began in July 2003, when a phone call from fellow computer scientist and e-voting expert David Dill alerted him to the fact that a copy of the source code for e-voting machines from the leading manufacturer, Diebold, had been posted to the internet. Assembling a couple of graduate students to work on the project with him, Rubin downloaded the code, studied it, and wrote a report detailing the many security flaws they found. Posting that report set off a lengthy public controversy that persists to this day.

Rubin spends a fair chunk of the book outlining the details of the media storm in which he found himself and his many interviews and public appearances. Unless you've just become unexpectedly famous and require pointers on how to handle the experience, this is disappointing: Rubin's personal story is less interesting than more technical material would be. In particular, more detail on the early criticisms Rubin's work received from his scientific peers would have been valuable.

In the end, what ought to have been a question of science and truth rapidly degenerated into a maelstrom of spin and hostility. Why, Rubin asks at some point, should some election officials react with as much hostility as the manufacturers when computer security experts point out flaws in election system design? You'd think that officials would be eager to ensure as fair and accountable elections as possible. Brave New Ballot does a pretty good job of showing how computer security design can become mired in politics and media.

Because UK elections tend to be so much simpler, it seems unlikely that this country will jettison paper ballots any time soon. But there is a big push to add internet, postal and mobile phone voting. Rubin's book cautions that we should be cautious about the security risks involved, and makes it clear that we should be demanding transparent paper audit trails. The definitive book on electronic voting, however, remains to be written.

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Overview

Brave New Ballot

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Editors rating: 6.5

Verdict

This book examines the security of electronic voting systems with reference to a specific incident. Although it has interesting things to say about the interface between science, politics and the media, the definitive book on e-voting has yet to be written.