The recent American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting included a session entitled "Science for Public Confidence in Election Fairness and Accuracy" and, as might be expected, computer science made a significant appearance. Ed Felten of Princeton, whose work in the area we've covered extensively, spoke and emphasized the limits of what computer science can do, and how the ultimate goal should be to ensure that electronic voting systems are verifiable and auditable. Of course, that raises the question of what you do with the auditing information, which is where Arlene Ash, a biostatistician at Boston University's School of Medicine, came in. It turns out that we already have excellent statistical tools for detecting problematic patterns of voting—the legal system just chooses to ignore them.
Felten and his fellow Princetonian Andrew Appel have been at the forefront of efforts to explore the security of e-voting systems, and Felten's talk was largely a recap of past news that we've covered extensively. When it comes to the equipment itself, it's mathematically impossible to verify that the code they run will behave properly under all circumstances, which means that the best we can do is provide a verifiable and auditable record of the vote, allowing problems to be identified retrospectively. Even that's difficult to reconcile with our expectations for anonymity; in describing the challenge of creating an algorithm that simultaneously encrypts and anonymizes the votes, Felten said, "we've reduced this to a previously unsolved problem—we're really good at that in computer science."
Until that problem is solved, many states are opting for optical scan voting or printing voter verifiable receipts, which can allow a post-election audit to identify significant problems. But running these audits raises a whole new series of issues, some of which are less a technical challenge than a matter of how carefully we want to listen to what an rigorous analysis of a vote tells us.