Electronic Voting, Spring 2020Apr 13 notes and discussion
Part of
the CS:4980:0004 Electronic Voting Notes
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The term "electronic poll book" appears to have been used as a trademark by I-Mark Systems Inc. It is listed in the statement of assets in the 1996 purchase agreemengt filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
It is no fun to try to understand a product from an SEC filing, but there is useful information buried here. I-Mark Systems was a wholly owned subsidiary of the seller and excluded from the sale, according to Recital E in the preface to the agreement. Furthermore, I-Mark "... develops software and hardware products, including the so-called 'Electronic Precinct System,' which provides advanced technology for the election processing industry ..."
Later, there's a list of its intellectual property assets in Article I Section 1.2(a)(8), where we learn that I-Mark used the names "Electronic Precinct Manager," "Electronic Ballot Station," "Electronic Poll Book," "Electronic Reporting Manager,"
It's really annoying that there's hardly any record remaining on the Internet of this innovative voting system, particularly because it's the direct ancestor of the AccuVote TS voting system later made by Global Election Systems which became Diebold Election Systems and then Premier Election Systems.
The one other surviving document I've found is a collection of 1996 certification documents from Texas. These documents focus on the Electronic Ballot Station, the actual voting machine the user interacts with. This (like the later AccuVote TS that evolved from it) required that the voter insert a smart card to enable the ballot, and it says "after the ballot is cast, the smart card is disabled and can be used again only after it has been reactivated by an election official."
The conditions listed at the end of Barny Knight's report indicate that the smart card used each voter to authorize the casting of one ballot included both the ballot style and the voter ID. Evidently Barny Knight was not happy with the inclusion of the ID. I speculate that this is because it threatened to violate the right to a secret ballot.
Tom Watson's report discusses the variety of uses the I-Mark system made of smart cards, but gives no new information.
Given that pollworkers do not have inherent ability to program smart cards without some kind of tool, the Texas reports imply that the I-mark system provided some kind of tool to do this, and that this tool must have had access to the voter list in order to put the voter ID on the card. The fact that I-Mark's assets included an "Electronic Poll Book" strongly suggests that that was the device used since poll books naturally include voter names, addresses, and ID numbers.
The Diebold Express Poll is the direct descendant of the I-Mark EPB. Read the vendor's promotional material!
After controversies about electronic voting systems and particularly, the state of Ohio commissioned an Evaluation and Validation of Election-Related Equipment, Standards and Testing (EVEREST). The reports from this project covered every voting system certified for use in Ohio as of 2007. Another consequence of the controversies was that Diebold, a century-old manufacturer of security equipment, decided to distance itself from it's election-systems division, so it was renamed Premier Election Systems.
Here, we are interested in what they have to say about the Express Poll system. Section 11.2 gives an overview of the entire voting system. Section 12.5.3 summarizes rather negative findings about the ExpressPoll subsystem. Sections 13.3.20 discusses a significant vulnerability involving the ExpressPoll, but most of the major problems are discussed in Section 14.6.
What is clear from this is that, between 1997 and 2007, the electronic pollbook function must have been subject to extraordinarily little criticism or oversight. This is a natural consequence of the way people traditionally thought of voting equipment. We focused on voting machines – the machines with which the voter actually interacted, not on entire systems. This is plainly obvious in the Texas certification documents, where the presence of something like the electronic pollbook is just barely implied but never mentioned.