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The Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) are guidelines adopted by the United States Election Assistance Commission (EAC) for the certification of voting systems. The National Institute of Standards and Technology's Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) drafts the VVSG and gives them to the EAC in draft form for their adoption.
The Election Assistance Commission was created by the 2002 Help America Vote Act, itself a response to the punch card ballot and multiple ballot style issues that surrounded the 2000 presidential election. [1] The resulting guidelines were intended to provide consistency in the integrity of voting systems. [1]
Writing in 2013, researchers at Auburn University critiqued the guidelines as needing to be paired with funding for states to participate. They argued that the more sophisticated states participated in the voluntary certification while most adapted parts of the guidelines or opted out altogether. [1]
Released in 2021, the VVSG 2.0 guidelines "allow for an improved and consistent voter experience, enabling all voters to vote privately and independently, ensuring votes are marked, verified and cast as intended, and that the final count represents the true will of the voters." [4]
"Equipment (including hardware, firmware, and software), materials, and documentation used to enact the following functions of an election:
All voting systems must also: [6]
A voting machine is a machine used to record votes in an election without paper. The first voting machines were mechanical but it is increasingly more common to use electronic voting machines. Traditionally, a voting machine has been defined by its mechanism, and whether the system tallies votes at each voting location, or centrally. Voting machines should not be confused with tabulating machines, which count votes done by paper ballot.
Electronic voting is voting that uses electronic means to either aid or take care of casting and counting ballots including voting time.
Electoral fraud, sometimes referred to as election manipulation, voter fraud, or vote rigging, involves illegal interference with the process of an election, either by increasing the vote share of a favored candidate, depressing the vote share of rival candidates, or both. It differs from but often goes hand-in-hand with voter suppression. What exactly constitutes electoral fraud varies from country to country, though the goal is often election subversion.
The Help America Vote Act of 2002, or HAVA, is a United States federal law which passed in the House 357-48 and 92–2 in the Senate and was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 29, 2002. The bill was drafted in reaction to the controversy surrounding the 2000 U.S. presidential election, when almost two million ballots were disqualified because they registered multiple votes or no votes when run through vote-counting machines.
The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is an independent agency of the United States government created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). The Commission serves as a national clearinghouse and resource of information regarding election administration. It is charged with administering payments to states and developing guidance to meet HAVA requirements, adopting voluntary voting system guidelines, and accrediting voting system test laboratories and certifying voting equipment. It is also charged with developing and maintaining a national mail voter registration form.
Vote counting is the process of counting votes in an election. It can be done manually or by machines. In the United States, the compilation of election returns and validation of the outcome that forms the basis of the official results is called canvassing.
Election Systems & Software is an Omaha, Nebraska-based company that manufactures and sells voting machine equipment and services. The company's offerings include vote tabulators, DRE voting machines, voter registration and election management systems, ballot-marking devices, electronic poll books, ballot on demand printing services, and absentee voting-by-mail services.
Various governments require a certification of voting machines.
End-to-end auditable or end-to-end voter verifiable (E2E) systems are voting systems with stringent integrity properties and strong tamper resistance. E2E systems use cryptographic techniques to provide voters with receipts that allow them to verify their votes were counted as cast, without revealing which candidates a voter supported to an external party. As such, these systems are sometimes called receipt-based systems.
The term "software independence" (SI) was coined by Dr. Ron Rivest and NIST researcher John Wack. A software independent voting machine is one whose tabulation record does not rely solely on software. The goal of an SI system is to definitively determine whether all votes were recorded legitimately or in error.
An Independent Testing Authority (ITA) is a laboratory certified by the United States–based National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) to test voting systems to the Voting System Standards (VSS) or the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) in the process of certifying voting systems. The Election Assistance Commission has taken over the responsibility for accrediting such laboratories and now uses the National Institute of Standards and Technology's National Voluntary Laboratory Accreditation Program. Under the EAC process, ITA's are now known as Voting System Testing Laboratories (VSTLs).
The Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology supports the Election Assistance Commission in the United States by providing recommendations on voluntary standards and guidelines related to voting equipment and technologies.
Election Markup Language (EML) is an XML-based standard to support end to end management of election processes.
Scantegrity is a security enhancement for optical scan voting systems, providing such systems with end-to-end (E2E) verifiability of election results. It uses confirmation codes to allow a voter to prove to themselves that their ballot is included unmodified in the final tally. The codes are privacy-preserving and offer no proof of which candidate a voter voted for. Receipts can be safely shown without compromising ballot secrecy.
A risk-limiting audit (RLA) is a post-election tabulation auditing procedure which can limit the risk that the reported outcome in an election contest is incorrect. It generally involves (1) storing voter-verified paper ballots securely until they can be checked, and (2) manually examining a statistical sample of the paper ballots until enough evidence is gathered to meet the risk limit.
An election audit is any review conducted after polls close for the purpose of determining whether the votes were counted accurately or whether proper procedures were followed, or both.
The Verified Voting Foundation is a non-governmental, nonpartisan organization founded in 2004 by David L. Dill, a computer scientist from Stanford University, focused on how technology impacts the administration of US elections. The organization's mission is to "strengthen democracy for all voters by promoting the responsible use of technology in elections." Verified Voting works with election officials, elected leaders, and other policymakers who are responsible for managing local and state election systems to mitigate the risks associated with novel voting technologies.
Election cybersecurity or election security refers to the protection of elections and voting infrastructure from cyberattack or cyber threat – including the tampering with or infiltration of voting machines and equipment, election office networks and practices, and voter registration databases.
Electronic voting in the United States involves several types of machines: touchscreens for voters to mark choices, scanners to read paper ballots, scanners to verify signatures on envelopes of absentee ballots, and web servers to display tallies to the public. Aside from voting, there are also computer systems to maintain voter registrations and display these electoral rolls to polling place staff.
Direct Recording Electronic with Integrity and Enforced Privacy (DRE-ip) is an End-to-End (E2E) verifiable e-voting system without involving any tallying authorities, proposed by Siamak Shahandashti and Feng Hao in 2016. It improves a previous DRE-i system by using a real-time computation strategy and providing enhanced privacy. A touch-screen based prototype of the system was trialed in the Gateshead Civic Centre polling station on 2 May 2019 during the 2019 United Kingdom local elections with positive voter feedback. A proposal that includes DRE-ip as a solution for large-scale elections was ranked 3rd place in the 2016 Economist Cybersecurity Challenge jointly organized by The Economist and Kaspersky Lab.