An interesting essay by security guru Bruce Schneier (via the brianstorms weblog) on the economics of fixing an election. Put simply: How much is it worth a party to fix an election, and so how much would they be willing to spend on doing it? Put another way, how much should the folk designing an electronic voting system assume will be spent on trying to get past the security software?
Bruce does the math and concludes ”that affecting the balance of power in the House of Representatives is worth at least $100M to the party who would otherwise be losing. So when designing the security behind the software, one must assume an attacker with a $100M budget. Conclusion: The risks to electronic voting machine software are even greater than first appears.”
Scary stuff. Although much of the emphasis of such articles has been on how this might be done in established democracies (and there’s still plenty to worry about there) my worry is how about how voting systems may be exported to the developing world.