Fact Sheet on NIST Voting Activities

What are NIST’s roles under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA)?

Is NIST just now beginning to work on this issue?

Has NIST had any previous experience with voting technology?

What work is NIST doing to improve the usability and accessibility of voting machines?

What groups and organizations are interested in voting standards?

How is the NIST voting standards work being funded?

Some past elections have been troubled by voting machine problems. Will new standards be in place by the 2004 election?

What are NIST’s roles under the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA)?

Enacted by Congress in October 2002, the HAVA legislation gives the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) a key role in helping realize nationwide improvements in voting systems by January 2006. NIST’s Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) is coordinating the agency’s HAVA efforts through its expertise in areas such as computer security and usability.

NIST’s initial activities under the HAVA include:

• Establishing a NIST Voting Systems Office;
• Networking with members of the elections community to learn about concerns and issues;
• Planning a voting systems testing laboratory accreditation program;
• Preparing a voting systems usability and accessibility report that looks at the impact of human factors on the effectiveness of election-related technologies; and
• Scheduling a symposium to begin fostering discussion, collaboration and consensus on voting reform among members of the elections community.

The HAVA calls for the creation of an Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to oversee voting standards work. Reporting to the EAC will be the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC), which will make recommendations on voluntary standards and guidelines related to voting machines. NIST will provide technical support to the TGDC and the NIST Director will serve as its chairman.

The agency’s longer-term roles under HAVA include:

• Chairing and managing the TGDC;
• Supporting the EAC and TGDC by providing research and recommendations of technologies/guidelines;
  Supplying technical guidance on implementing election-related technologies (e.g. encryption, usability engineering and testing);
• Improving testing programs and conformity assessment for voting systems;
• Enabling pilot studies to facilitate the development of new election technologies; and
• Fostering the development of voluntary, consensus guidelines with participation from the entire voting standards community.
  

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Is NIST just now beginning to work on this issue?

No. NIST has been working on voting standards in a variety of ways. A thorough study of usability and accessibility issues is nearing completion. The NIST Voting Systems Office has been established and its director is already at work.

Staff from a number of NIST laboratories have been networking with numerous state and local election officials, voting machine vendors, and other members of the election community to understand the issues and build solid working relationships for upcoming HAVA collaborations.

The highlight of these initial NIST efforts under the HAVA will be the First Symposium on Building Trust and Confidence in Voting Systems, Dec. 10-11, 2003, at NIST’s Gaithersburg, Md., headquarters. The symposium will help NIST to partner with the election community about the implementation of the HAVA. It will include four panel discussions on the following key issues for improving voting systems:

1. specification, testability and qualification;
2. security and openness;
3. usability and accessibility; and
4. next steps and consensus issues.

However, NIST’s role as chair of the TGDC has not yet begun. The TGDC reports to the EAC established under the HAVA. The four candidates for membership on the EAC have only recently been nominated and each one must still be confirmed by the Senate.

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Has NIST had any previous experience with voting technology?

Yes.

During the 1970s, few states had any guidelines for testing or evaluating voting machines. Stories about voting equipment problems and failures circulated among election officials, triggering concerns about the integrity of the voting process.

In 1975, NIST (known then as the National Bureau of Standards, or NBS) prepared a report titled, Effective Use of Computing Technology in Vote Tallying (NBS Special Publication 500-30), which is available in print by sending a request to

http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/NBS_SP_500-30.pdf.

The report concluded that one cause of computer-related election problems was the lack of technical skills at the state and local level for developing or implementing complex written standards against which voting system hardware and software could be tested.

This report, along with comments from state and local election officials, led the U.S. Congress to designate the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) to work with NIST to conduct a study of the feasibility of developing national standards for voting systems. The FEC released the study in 1982. Congress appropriated funds for the FEC to develop national standards for computer-based voting systems.

NIST also published a study in 1988, Accuracy, Integrity, and Security in Computerized Vote-Tallying (NBS Special Publication 500-158), which is available at:

www.itl.nist.gov/lab/specpubs/sp500-158.htm

The report included detailed recommendations to improve voting systems and enhance public confidence in election results. The recommendations focused on identified, widely publicized problems and concerned hardware, software, operational procedures and institutional changes.

The report proposed that the idea of internal control – almost universally used to protect operations that produced goods and services – be applied to vote tallying. For hardware, the recommendations addressed the accuracy of ballot reading, and the design and certification of systems that do not use ballots (including punch cards).

For software, the recommendations addressed certification, assurance of logical correctness, and protection against contamination by hidden code. Improved pre-election testing and partial manual recounting of ballots also were recommended.

In addition, the report summarized some significant events concerning computerized vote tallying. These included development of performance specifications, publication of a series of articles in the New York Times that raised questions about the reliability of voting systems, and activities in Texas leading to passage of a revised statute on electronic voting systems. Finally, the document analyzed difficulties in certain elections and discussed relative vulnerabilities of different types of vote-tallying systems.

The 1988 study led to the adoption of voting standards by the FEC. It was privately funded by The John and Mary R. Markle Foundation, based in New York.

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What work is NIST doing to improve the usability and accessibility of voting machines?

In response to the HAVA, computer scientists at NIST have begun to examine the usability and accessibility of voting machines. The researchers are reviewing existing voting machine standards in light of a growing body of research and best practices in the areas of usability engineering and testing, human-computer interaction and human factors.

For example, voting machines that use touch screen technology need to be designed in a way that makes it easy for all voters to use and minimizes errors. One evaluation of such machines conducted by University of Maryland researchers found that sometimes the final touch point that allowed people to cast votes was too close to other touch selections, making it easy for people to vote accidentally before they had gone through the entire ballot.

In another case, the American Foundation for the Blind reviewed machines with systems that allowed the blind and visually impaired to hear the ballot read to them. The AFB study found that high-quality human audio voice recordings were easier to understand than synthesized speech.

The ultimate goal of NIST’s assigned HAVA work is to ensure that there are standards and testing methodologies for usability and accessibility that ensure that people are able to cast a valid vote quickly and independently, and feel confident that it was cast the way they intended. Additionally, voting machines should be designed in a way that allows poll workers to set up the machines properly and easily. These measures should reduce human errors that could lead to an inaccurate final tally.

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What groups and organizations are interested in voting standards?

Many of the entities interested in NIST's role also are potential users for the voting systems reforms that the HAVA will ensure. These entities include:

• State and local governments;
• Local election officials;
• State election officials/boards of election;
• The National Association of State Election Directors;
• The National Association of Secretaries of State;
• The International Association of Clerks, Recorders, Election Officials and Treasurers;
• The American Disability Association;
• Vendors of voting equipment and systems;
• Members of the voting conformance testing industry;
• Representatives of the cybersecurity and privacy community;
• Independent testing authorities; and
• Standards organizations

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How is the NIST voting standards work being funded?

For fiscal year 2003 (which ended Sept. 30, 2003), Congress appropriated $500,000 for the NIST HAVA effort. As the fiscal year 2004 appropriation has not yet been finalized, NIST is currently on a continuing resolution that assumes funding will remain at FY 2003 levels.

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Some past elections have been troubled by voting machine problems. Will new standards be in place by the 2004 election?

No standards based on any federal recommendations will be in place before the 2004 national elections.

The voting reforms that result from the HAVA must be effective by Jan. 1, 2006.

On that date, the HAVA requires that all voting systems used in federal elections:

• Maintain voter privacy and ballot confidentiality;
• Permit voters to verify their selections on the ballot, notify them of overvotes, and permit them to change their votes and correct any errors before casting the ballot; however, jurisdictions using paper ballot, punchcard, or central-count voting systems (including absentee and mail-in ballots) may instead use voter education and instruction programs for notification of overvotes;
• Produce a permanent paper record for the voting system that can be manually audited and is available as an official record for recounts;
• Provide to individuals with disabilities, including the blind and visually impaired, the same accessibility to voting as other voters;
• Provide alternative language accessibility as required by law; and
• Comply with the error rate standards in the federal voting system standards in effect on the date of enactment.

The HAVA also requires each state to adopt uniform standards defining what constitutes a vote and what will be counted as a vote for each certified voting system.