The increasing sophistication of computer technology towards the end of the 1990s led to the most recent development in the evolution of voting systems: Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) systems.
Use of DRE systems is expanding and in Belgium, Brasil, India and Venezuela most if not all voters use a DRE device to vote while in the United States and other coutries the percentage of voters using DRE devices to vote is increasing.
Using DRE systems, voters mark their votes directly into an electronic device, using a touch screen, push buttons or a similar device. Where write-in ballots are permissible, an alphabetic keyboard is sometimes provided to allow voters to cast write-in votes.
With DRE systems there is no need for paper ballots. Voting data is stored by the electronic device, on a computer hard disk or a portable diskette, CD-ROM or smartcard. For backup and verification purposes, some systems copy voting data onto more than one storage medium. For example, in Belgium, voting data is written both to a hard disk and to a smartcard issued to the voter. After voting, the voter places the used smartcard in a ballot box. The smartcard can be used as backup should the hard disk copy fail, or as a way of auditing the data recorded on the hard disk.
When the polls close, the data from the various voting locations are amalgamated in a central computer, which calculates the vote totals. Data can be transmitted to the central computer either on removable portable devices such as diskettes, or by a computer network.
Since the 1990s the telephone has also been used as a type of DRE voting system. Voters are able to record votes directly into computer systems using the key pads on their telephones, and to identify themselves with Personal Identity Numbers (PINs), by following a series of recorded instructions.
The introduction of DRE voting options at locations away from polling places, like internet voting and telephone voting, raises the issue of identifying the voter remotely which has not yet been solved to security standards required by the need to ensure that the person voting is indeed a voter, that he can not vote more than once and that the vote is secret.
DRE Software
3. Is there any version control to prevent changes after a software version has been reviewed an approved?
4. Is it in the public domain or is it proprietary?