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My Supplemental E-Voting Testimony
Today I submitted supplemental written testimony, adding to my previous testimony from last week’s e-voting hearing before the House Administration Committee, Subcommittee on Elections. Today’s supplemental testimony is short, so I’ll just include it here. (The formatted version is available too.)
Thank you for the opportunity to submit this supplemental written testimony.
Some people have suggested that it might be possible to use an electronic verification system instead of the voter-verified paper ballot required by H.R. 811. For example, the verification system might be an electronic recording device developed separately from the voting machine. Congressman Ehlers mentioned this possibility during the hearing.
The idea behind such proposals is to use redundancy as a safeguard against fraud or malfunction, in the hope that a failure in one system will be redeemed by the correct behavior of the other.
Redundancy works best when the redundant systems fail independently. If System A fails whenever System B fails, then using A and B redundantly provides no benefit at all. On the other hand, if A always works perfectly when B fails, then redundancy can eliminate error entirely. Neither of these extreme cases will hold in practice. Instead we expect to see some correlation between failures of A and failures of B. Our goal is to minimize this correlation.
One way to avoid correlated failures is to make the two systems as different as possible. Common sense says that similar systems will tend to fail in similar ways and at similar times – exactly the kind of correlated failures that we want to avoid. Experience bears this out, which is why we generally want redundant systems to be as diverse as possible.
The desire for diversity is a strong argument for keeping a paper [...]
Read more at Ed Felten
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