Recent elections have seen the rise of pure electronic voting. Is spyware an issue in electronic voting?
[Last updated 2005-06-18] A: I am not aware of any rumors of spyware affecting elections. However, both the motives of spyware creators and the way in which computers are being used in elections argue that the danger of malicious groups influencing democratic elections is significant, and that the danger increases very rapidly if the election is made all-electronic. The counter for this danger is surprisingly simple: All elections should create and retain physical, non-electronic copies of every original vote, just as elections have been done for hundreds of years. If physical voting records prove to ambiguous — e.g. the infamous dangling chads of the 2000 U.S. Presidential elections — then the correct solution is to design voting machines that minimize the physical ambiguity of each voting record, such as by ensuring full removal of every selected chad. Far from removing doubt, converting voter records from physical to all-electronic form enormously increases ambiguity in two ways.
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