E-Voting Isn’t Perfect, But It Takes Less Work to Corrupt Big Elections

Thad Hall, a political scientist at Caltech, complains that e-voting critics rarely make apples-to-apples comparisons between electronic and paper voting systems. They contend that if traditional paper voting systems were subjected to the same kind of close scrutiny that e-voting endures, security experts would find flaws—ballot tampering, ballot box stuffing, and so forth—at least as serious as the problems commonly identified in touch-screen voting machines. Rice computer scientist Dan Wallach responds by pointing to a new paper he’s written proposing an elegant way to think about the security of voting systems. Computer scientists use "big-O" notation to describe the complexity of algorithms. He suggests a similar terminology to describe the effort required to compromise voting systems as a function of the size of the election. A security flaw that can be compromised with an effort proportional to the number of voters N is said to be a O(N) flaw. A f...