A Secure and Verifiable Voting System

meese writes "The cryptographer David Chaum, through discussion with top cryptographers such as Ron Rivest, has designed a secure and verifiable voting system. One of the goals of his design is that anyone can verify that votes were tabulated correctly. It's good to see real security/crypto people working on this problem. They also have a press release."

Comments

David Chaum...

[Stile 65]

...is an awesome mathematician/cryptographer. I'm working on a project (on SourceForge, but it's not nearly far enough along for me to announce anything on /. yet) based on his digital cash system, and some other things he's done. Yes, I know it's patented, but it's really meant as a proof-of-concept type deal.

I just hope that if Chaum starts a company for his e-voting solution, it fares better than Digicash. IIRC, he wouldn't sell to M$ for $100M or to Visa for $40M, but ended up bankrupting Digicash and having to leave it. I'm not sure if I've got all the details right, so anyone's welcome to correct me.

I've attended a David Chaum lecture

[acidblood]

in an workshop held here in Brazil (Alfred Menezes and Darrel Hankerson were the other lecturers). Folks, the system is perfect. There's nothing to complain about it -- laymen can check that their votes were counted through so-called `visual cryptography' (an idea of Adi Shamir IIRC), while everything else you'd expect from a secure and reliable voting system is provided. One can only hope that this is deployed somewhere, but I'm not holding my breath.

Read the paper, it's really jawdropping. Cryptography at its finest.

Re:Combination..

[The Raven]

You did not read the paper very carefully. The receipt can be proven to have the proper 'signature' (think public key cryptography), and it can be proven to have been tallied. But it CANNOT be proven to correspond to a specific vote, thus it cannot be used for coercion. The paper makes that explicitly clear in the first couple pages of the report.