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EDITORIAL Election Science
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n the advent of the Iraq war, we had to worry about inspection science. Now, as a national election approaches in the United States, we should give a thought or two to election science. Among the rich possibilities for research here, two questions emerge that need serious attention: How do we guarantee the accountability of the voting system? And what does information technology have to offer? We voters should be interested in the answers, because we want to preserve our faith in the system and its fairness. The two fundamental requirements are traceability (we’d like to know that our vote counted as delivered) and privacy (we don’t want our vote known by others). The system for counting votes ought to deliver both objectives without requiring us to rely on trust. In this important domain of voterecording methods, we are now looking at a new technology that is being quickly adopted: electronic touch-screen voting machines, manufactured by a few corporations and delivered to a number of states for hefty prices. Maryland, for example, just shelled out $55 million for machines known as the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting System. Enthusiasm for electronic vote-counting on the part of state election commissions is understandable; few, naturally, want a debacle of the kind that turfed the 2000 Florida presidential vote into the Supreme Court. Computer science and cryptography experts can get passionate about the science issues here. The consensus view, with which a few will disagree, is that for traceability, electronic machines should provide for a voter-verifiable audit trail in which a computerized system prints a paper ballot that is read and verified by the voter. Such paper confirmation can be given to the voter privately, as well as be retained by officials for later verification. Most of the machines aren’t equipped for this (including the ones that Mary