Brennan Center Study Identifies Security, Accessibility and Usability Trade-offs in Voting Systems

The Brennan Center for Justice has released The Machinery of Democracy: Voting System Security, Accessibility, Usability, and Cost (pdf). The report is the final product of the first comprehensive, empirical analysis of electronic voting systems in the United States.

From the report:

Two themes emerge from our four-part analysis. First, there has been surprisingly little empirical study of voting systems in the areas of security, accessibility, usability, and cost. The result is that jurisdictions are making purchasing decisions and adopting laws and procedures that bear little correlation to the goals they seek to accomplish. Advocates urge security measures that provide questionable security value, while ignoring steps that provide the best chance of catching the simplest attacks on the integrity of an election. Jurisdictions purchase accessible voting machines that do not yet fully address the needs of their disabled communities and without obtaining contractual guarantees that new accessibility features will be added at little or no extra cost as they become available. Counties make decisions about ballot design and instruction language without performing usability testing to avoid voter confusion and mistake. And state and local election officials often purchase voting machines by looking almost exclusively at initial costs, with little regard to long-term costs, which will almost always make up the vast majority of the voting system’s total cost. {Emphasis in original]

Second, there is not yet any perfect voting system or set of procedures. One system might be more affordable than others, but less accessible to the disabled; some election procedures might make systems easier to use, but less secure. Communities across the country will have to decide what is most important to them: how much are they willing to pay for secure, usable, and accessible systems? Will they sacrifice usability for security? Accessibility for cost? In some cases, the decisions will be mandated by law. In others, there will be difficult choices to make. Election officials and the public should be aware of the trade-offs they are making when choosing one voting system or set of procedures over another, and they should know how to improve achievement of all four values, irrespective of which system they choose.

See also, the Center's earlier reports in its Voting Rights & Election series: The Machinery of Democracy: Protecting Elections in an Electronic World (pdf) and Making the List: Database Matching and Verification Processes for Voter Registration (pdf). [JH]