Towards a Robust Distributed Framework for Election-Day Voter Check-In

Electronic poll books are computerized distributed systems that replace paper-based voter lists used to enable eligible voters to cast their ballots on the Election Day. These systems have the potential for speeding up voter check-in at the polling place, and making voter records more accurate by reducing human errors in dealing with printed voter lists and post-election transcription. At the same time, electronic poll books are non-trivial distributed computing systems, and ensuring correctness, security, integrity, fault-tolerance, and performance of such systems is a challenging problem. In fact we are not aware of a single commercially available system that does not contain major deficiencies and risk factors. This paper focuses on the distributed system aspects of electronic poll book solutions and identifies the obstacles that are inherent in any distributed system that must deal with failure and asynchrony while providing a consistent and dependable service. We review several requirements that need to be satisfied by electronic poll book systems, we discuss selected important results from distributed computing research that the commercial developers of electronic poll book systems appear to not be aware of. We then present a wider landscape, including social and political science aspects, we survey broader research issues, and discuss system implementation considerations. This paper brings for the first time to the attention of the research community an in-depth presentation of an important new problem of immediate relevance. Moreover, the electronic poll book technology is an attractive application domain for the research results in dependable and secure distributed computing.