The term "software independence" (SI) was coined by Dr.

Ron Rivest Ronald Linn Rivest (; born May 6, 1947) is a cryptographer and an Institute Professor at MIT. He is a member of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intell ...

and

NIST The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical sci ...

researcher John Wack. A software independent

voting machine A voting machine is a machine used to record votes in an election without paper. The first voting machines were mechanical but it is increasingly more common to use ''electronic voting machines''. Traditionally, a voting machine has been defin ...

is one whose tabulation record does not rely solely on software. The goal of an SI system is to definitively determine whether all votes were recorded legitimately or in error. The technical definition of SI is:

''A voting system is software-independent if an undetected change or error in its software cannot cause an undetectable change or error in an election outcome.''

SI has been redefined as a global property for a tabulation of votes rather than of each individual vote, aiming to detect rather than prevent error and fraud through human processes.

TGDC Resolution

The

Election Assistance Commission The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is an independent agency of the United States government created by the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). The Commission serves as a national clearinghouse and resource of information regarding electi ...

Technical Guidelines Development Committee The Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology supports the Election Assistance Commission in the United States by providing recommendations on voluntary standards and guidelines related ...

adopted an SI resolution for the next iteration of the

Voluntary Voting System Guidelines The Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) are guidelines adopted by the United States Election Assistance Commission (EAC) for the certification of voting systems. The National Institute of Standards and Technology's Technical Guidelines Develo ...

(VVSG):Resolutions Adopted by the TGDC at the December 4 and 5 Plenary Session
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''Election officials and vendors have appropriately responded to the growing complexity of voting systems by adding more stringent access controls, encryption, testing, and physical security to election procedures and systems. The TGDC has considered current threats to voting systems and, at this time, finds that security concerns do not warrant replacing deployed voting systems where EAC Best Practices are used.''

''To provide auditability and proactively address the increasing difficulty of protecting against all prospective threats, the TGDC directs STS to write requirements for the next version of the VVSG requiring the next generation of voting systems to be software independent. The TGDC directs STS and HFP to draft usability and accessibility requirements to ensure that all voters can verify the independent voting record.''

''The TGDC further directs STS and Core Requirements and Testing Subcommittees (CRT) to draft requirements to ensure that systems that produce independently verifiable voting records are reliable and provide adequate support for audits.''

Example systems

Examples of software-independent voting systems are

optical scan voting system An optical scan voting system is an electronic voting system and uses an optical scanner to read marked paper ballots and tally the results. History Marksense systems While mark sense technology dates back to the 1930s and optical mark recogni ...

s and direct recording electronic voting computers (DRE) with a

voter verified paper audit trail Voter verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) or verified paper record (VPR) is a method of providing feedback to voters using a ballotless voting system. A VVPAT is intended as an independent verification system for voting machines designed to allow ...

TGDC Resolution

Example systems

References

See also