VoxBlog

Like many Americans, I went to the polls yesterday to vote.  While we do not have the oft-maligned electronic voting machines and all the problems that go with them, security is still definitely an issue that needs to be addressed.  Maybe it is just here in the trusting Midwest, but voting required no authentication process.  Although I needed to provide proof of residence several years ago to initially register, authentication since then consists simply of signing next to my name on their list.

While this is obviously bad security, it got me thinking of how they would recover from a security breach.  The knee-jerk response is: “fix the security so you don’t have to deal with it!”  Adding some sort of authentication would be good, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to deal with the reaction to a break in security.   In reality, any security system can be broken and so recovering from a failure must be carefully thought through.

In this case, the fact that an illegal vote was cast would only be discovered when a person comes to vote and finds that someone had already voted as them.  Options for recovery would include:

• Ignore the problem and let the real voter still vote
• Not let the real voter cast a vote
• Throw out all previous votes because they cannot be trusted
• Handle the situation differently depending on the extent of the security failure

I’ll leave it as an excersize to the reader to find a solution that does not disenfranchise voters and yet prevents voter fraud.  Bonus points will be awarded for anyone who knows the legal response.

While it is easy to complain about security and government processes, it is a lesson to everyone: Study processes for handling security breaches as closely as you study your security system.