Communications of the ACM
Poll Star: Rice Team Sets Sights on Better Voting Machine
Rice University experts are helping design a new voting system that would make use of tablet computing technology to hold down costs and improve usability and security.
Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University
The U.S. Presidential Commission on Election Administration recently released a report indicating U.S. election officials are facing an "impending crisis" as they try to replace the aging voting systems they purchased after Florida's flawed 2000 election.
Meanwhile, Rice University researchers are developing the Secure, Transparent, Auditable and Reliable (STAR) voting system, an unhackable voting system they say will be less expensive than existing electronic-voting machines but easy for voters to use. The researchers received a three-year, $1.2-million U.S. National Science Foundation grant that will enable them to examine several security and usability issues while they are testing the STAR system.
"Voting is too important to experiment with, so you need to work out all the kinks before you put anything into the polls during a real election," says Rice professor Dan Wallach. "I'd like to think we will have something ready in time to be used in the midterm elections in 2018."
He notes the researchers also are working to build the system around commercially available tablet computers, a decision that could result in a system that is about half the price of conventional e-voting systems.
From Rice University
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