The authors developed a software development approach, which they call a pre-rendered user interface (PRUI), but can be published before election day. The PRUI is an electronic sample ballot that could enable the general public to participate in the verification, usability testing, and accessibility testing of the ballot to be used on election day.
Problems that are identified by the public could be remedied before the election. By preparing the user interface apart from the voting machine, the difficulty of software verification is greatly reduced. The prototype developed by the authors supports a variety of user interface styles.
The advantages cited for a PRUI are:
- It simplifies the software running in the voting machine, facilitating its verification.
- It mitigates the conflict between accessibility and security concerns by enabling the UI design to be highly flexible without affecting the security properties of the machine.
- It mitigates the conflict between the proprietary interests of voting machine vendors and the public benefits of transparency by reducing the portion of code that has to be disclosed to evaluate the security of the machine.
- It enables the UI to be updated and verified independently of, and more easily than, the voting machine software.
- It allows the UI to be separately published and to be run on commodity hardware, enabling it to be tested by anyone—not just those with access to the equipment that will actually be used on election day.
Links
Yee, K. P., Wagner, D., Hearst, M., & Bellovin, S. M. (2006). Prerendered user interfaces for higher-assurance electronic voting. Paper presented at the 2006 USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop, Vancouver, Canada.
(Summary from: AB, UCL)