Legal Issues Facing Election Officials in an Electronic-Voting World

Abstract

Recent publicity concerning the reliability and security of various electronic voting systems has increased public scrutiny of the machines themselves as well as the election process as a whole. The election officials who are responsible for electing, maintaining, and operating electronic voting systems face not only public inquiry but also a thicket of state and federal legal issues.

We provide in this paper a general analysis of typical legal issues that elections officials face (or should consider). This paper analyzes legal issues that surround three broad categories of activities that elections officials undertake, or might wish to undertake: Security testing, public disclosure and auditing, and assembling systems from separate components. Finally, we discuss how state election codes and contract law, as well as copyright and trade secret law, might affect elections officials who wish to combine components from different manufacturers into a single electronic voting system.

Keywords: elections, voting, electronic voting

JEL Classification: K39