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Information Technology Laboratory

Voting

VVSG Structure

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READ-ONLY SITE MATERIALS: Historical voting TWiki site (2015-2020) ARCHIVED from https://collaborate.nist.gov/voting/bin/view/Voting

Purpose

This topic is for the discussion and development of the structure of the Next Generation VVSG.

  • An initial document capturing preliminary thoughts on scope and structure is located here in PDF formats.

Introduction

The structure section of the VVSG Scope and Structure Document contains six subsections that summarize an approach to developing standards for emerging voting system technologies based on a structure of principles and guidelines.

In order to illustrate the details of this structure based on high level principles, we have focused our analysis, in this section, on the human factors of voting systems. It is our intention is that it will serve as a model for developing standards that support security, commercial-off-the-shelf hardware, software, and other aspects of voting systems, while at the same time be responsive to the evolving technology landscape.

The structure section of the VVSG Scope and Structure Document is intended to help elicit feedback from the election community on the future structure and scope of the voting standards. Together with use case scenarios, they drive gap analysis as well.

Request for Feedback

Specifically, we are requesting your feedback on this approach to structuring the Next Generation VVSG requirements.

Please consider these questions:

  1. Is this organization based on high level principles and guidelines useful to you? Why? How would you use a standards document structured in this way?

  2. Is the proposed document format style in Subsection 4 useful?

  3. Do you have suggestions for improvement? Is something missing?

  4. Is the analysis helpful?

  5. What do you think the next steps should be?

Overview

The five subsections of the structure section of the VVSG Scope and Structure Document include:

  1. Usability and accessibility principles and guidelines.

  2. Analysis of the human factors challenges in developing standards for emerging technologies for voting systems.

  3. A set of tables containing voting system requirements reorganized under the principles and guidelines which have been annotated to identify gaps and possible updates. This also shows how other accessibility standards can be integrated with the voting system requirements. It is a baseline that will serve to drive feedback from the election community. We expect to see lots of changes as we move forward.

  4. Illustration of how the design of structure of the standards could provide a more intuitive way for election officials as well as advocates, developers, and test labs to find, understand, and navigate the guidelines, requirements, and test assertions to find the information they need.

  5. Example of how an Election Official (EO) might use the new structure when preparing to procure an electronic ballot marking tablet through a mockup of a subset of the requirements under Principle 3: Marked as Intended. This mockup is based on the requirements reorganized as in the tables in number 3 above.
     

Voting TWiki Archive (2015-2020): read-only, archived wiki site, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

ARCHIVE SITE DESCRIPTION AND DISCLAIMER

This page, and related pages, represent archived materials (pages, documents, links, and content) that were produced and/or provided by members of public working groups engaged in collaborative activities to support the development of the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) 2.0. These TWiki activities began in 2015 and continued until early 2020. During that time period, this content was hosted on a Voting TWiki site. That TWiki site was decommissioned in 2020 due to technology migration needs. The TWiki activities that generated this content ceased to operate actively through the TWiki at the time the draft VVSG 2.0 was released, in February of 2020. The historical pages and documents produced there have been archived now in read-only, static form.

  • The archived materials of this TWiki (including pages, documents, links, content) are provided for historical purposes only.
  • They are not actively maintained.
  • They are provided "as is" as a public service.
  • They represent the "work in progress" efforts of a community of volunteer members of public working groups collaborating from late 2015 to February of 2020.
  • These archived materials do not necessarily represent official or peer-reviewed NIST documents nor do they necessarily represent official views or statements of NIST.
  • Unless otherwise stated these materials should be treated as historical, pre-decisional, artifacts of public working group activities only.
  • NIST MAKES NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTY OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT AND DATA ACCURACY.
  • NIST does not warrant or make any representations regarding the correctness, accuracy, reliability or usefulness of the archived materials.

ARCHIVED VOTING TWIKI SITE MATERIALS

This wiki was a collaborative website. NIST does not necessarily endorse the views expressed, or concur with the facts presented on these archived TWiki materials. Further, NIST does not endorse any commercial products that may be mentioned in these materials. Archived material on this TWiki site is made available to interested parties for informational and research purposes. Materials were contributed by Participants with the understanding that all contributed material would be publicly available.  Contributions were made by Participants with the understanding that that no copyright or patent right shall be deemed to have been waived by such contribution or disclosure. Any data or information provided is for illustrative purposes only, and does not imply a validation of results by NIST. By selecting external links, users of these materials will be leaving NIST webspace. Links to other websites were provided because they may have information that would be of interest to readers of this TWiki. No inferences should be drawn on account of other sites being referenced, or not referenced, from this page or these materials. There may be other websites or references that are more appropriate for a particular reader's purpose.

 

Voting systems
Created August 28, 2020, Updated February 5, 2021