Voting is a unique large scale system intended for use by the public for a very short time. Thus, it has a need for a higher level of the assurance than other systems that are used daily by the public. With this in mind, we can add reliability, scaleability, and recoverability to our list of goals that voting systems should strive toward. These goals are not unique to voting systems, and there are many goals voting systems should meet that are not listed here, but the nature of a voting system makes these goals stand out.

Scalability

The system should scale, but when we say scale we mean many things. The first of which is that it should scale with the number of voters. There should not be an upper limit to the number of voters, and the counting processes should still finish in a reasonable amount of time after the election is complete. This should also be true for the number of candidates per race and number of races per ballot, although there is a limit to what most people are able to tolerate. Lastly, the system should not have technical limitations preventing it from implementing certain election rules such as plurality, approval voting, range voting, and rank voting systems.

Reliability

It must be more reliable and resistant to disruption than the power grid, and any voting system must support a way to continue operation without power. Barring natural disaster or violent military actions that keep voters away from the polls, the system must work.

Recoverability

There should be ways to recover as best as is possible from catastrophic failures. In many cases this is a matter of redundancy and procedures (e.g. constantly publish the current count of votes each time period). The difficulty here is that you wish to achieve recoverability without drastically affecting the rest of the system or putting a lot of responsibility on volunteers.

That’s all I have for now, and I am heading out for a vacation. For those who have been following, I look forward to reading your comments when I get back (as I am certain there are many other goals that I am missing). I think a next step for this discussion would be to make some sort of report card for systems we’ve come across. Suggestions are welcome, I hope my posts so far have got you thinking.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Voting Goals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.