Draft Security Considerations for Remote Electronic UOCAVA Voting

Draft: Security Considerations for Remote Electronic UOCAVA Voting, Draft White Paper for the TGDC

The first public draft of Security Consideration for Remote Electronic UOCAVA Voting (PDF format), is now available for public comment. This draft whitepaper for the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC) identifies desirable security properties of remote electronic voting systems, potential benefits and threats to these systems, and current and emerging technical approaches for mitigating risks.

This document is intended for election officials, technologists, advocacy groups, UOCAVA voting system vendors, and other members of the elections community that will be working with the EAC, NIST, and the FVAP on improving the UOCAVA voting process with the use of electronic technologies. While this document assumes familiarity of the UOCAVA voting process and a high-level understanding of information system security technologies, it is intended to be accessible to a wide audience.

This document is part of a series of documents that address the UOCAVA voting.  The first NIST publication on UOCAVA voting, entitled NISTIR 7551 A Threat Analysis on UOCAVA Voting Systems, was released in December 2008.  In addition to NISTIR 7551, NIST released a draft of NISTIR 7682 Information Systems Security Best Practices for UOCAVA-Supporting Systems in April 2010, and recently released a draft of NISTIR 7711 Security Best Practices for the Electronic Transmission of UOCAVA Election Materials.  While these documents have focused on address security issues, NIST researchers have also prepared a draft whitepaper for the TGDC entitled Accessibility and Usability Considerations for Remote Electronic UOCAVA Voting, which was recently released for public comment.

NIST requests comments on this draft whitepaper for the TGDC by September 1, 2010. Please submit comments to uocava-voting [at] nist.gov (uocava-voting[at]nist[dot]gov)