US Election Assistance Commission - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines Vote
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Name :   David Webber
Organization :   OASIS Election Markup Language (EML) TC
Post Date :   9/6/2005

General Comments
Comment :  Public Comment on VVSG1 draft June. 05

To the Commission:

Some vendors appear to be taking steps to integrate their voting solutions
with voter registration systems.

Whatever the intentions and motivations to this there are some fundamental
principles being broken here that need to be clarified and protected by  
the
VVSG.

1) There has to be a complete physical separation between the voter
registration system and the voting system. No direct realtime electronic
connection can be permitted, nor can the voting system know in anyway who
voters are, nor store lists of voters.

2) The only connection between the two systems is the voter themselves and
the physical act of voting. That is the principle we need to establish in
the VVSG.

3) So when a voter is acknowledged in the registration system and is
provided access to the voting system, they carry a physical access token  
of
some kind that denotes their entitlement to vote.  Their voting event then
corresponds to the event in the registration system.

4) Because voting is private this process has to be anonymous and a voting
system can have no knowledge of voters demographic information of any  
kind,
even and especially including total numbers of voters registered or other
metrics.

I believe these priniciples need to be enshrined in the architecture
requirements for EAC VVSG based systems.