Aviel David Rubin

This book is a narrative of 18 months in the life of a computer science professor who became embroiled, rather willingly, in the political struggles around electronic voting before the 2004 US presidential election.

It seems that many election officials rushed into DRE voting in a reaction to avoid the various difficulties that had caused much controversy during the 2000 elections with less than due consideration, and that this brought about a response from a variety of people, computer security experts among them.

The book is written in the anecdotal style, which tries to slip the useful technical detail in with a narrative, like hiding the vegetables under the pepperoni. It's a very popular style, but the author testified at so many hearings, and went to so many gatherings of one sort or another, that the many characters in his narrative are just about indistinguishable.

The book is still valuable in a few ways. It works as an historical narrative reasonably well. It allows one to see that things can change pretty rapidly, if effort is made. In 2000, Florida's election management became a byword for incompetence, but that's been reformed since, and Florida elections could now be a model for other states. The book shows the partisan nature of every issue, even if that issue should be non-partisan. At the time the book was written, Democrats were the ones who seemed most concerned with election integrity, principally, perhaps, because one of the biggest manufacturers of electronic voting machines, Diebold, had an avowedly Republican CEO. Now, each party runs the "stolen election" playbook virtually automatically and their protestations get plenty of media exposure and publicity, even if some of it is adverse. More sober efforts to ensure that the election process is secure, anonymous, etc. or concerns that it is not are virtually disregarded by those same media when there is not that partisan angle when they are not condemned as "voter suppression".

The book used to have its own website, but no longer. The author used to be a professor at Johns Hopkins, but has retired, apparently to go into business full time, at least judging by his personal website (https://avirubin.com/Vita.html). He leaves behind a bunch of still possibly good links:

* https://vote.caltech.edu
* https://www.calvoter.org
* https://accurate-voting.org
* https://verifiedvoting.org
* https://www.eac.gov
* https://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~jones/voting/

This book is the rare book in which an actual, i.e., not fake, expert addresses the problem of securing elections in a non-partisan and public-facing manner. There are not many other books of this nature, so we might as well be grateful for its existence, despite its flaws.… (mer)