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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."
In order to be verifiable, you need the paper output. If they voting machines would generate a unique paper output from each machine as a backup, votes could be recounted and audited. Each paper ballot could be encrypted and stored in 2D electronic barcode. It would be easy to scan and verify and data could not be altered without invalidating the crc's. Electronic voting will never be stand alone until we have a valid way to audit the results. cjg
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
Me again from VoteHere, open source is fine if it is all you have, but it is far better to have an auditable data trail. Remember, that computers like the ones in most voting machines are "general purpose computing devices" so it is difficult to know exactly what code is running on them. Opening the source will help you be sure that there somewhere exists good software that if you ran it in the voting machines would lead to an accurate election, but it does not give any confidence that the machine actually was running that software, and only that software. Paper makes for a fine audit trail if you have nothing better, but ask anyone who voted in Chicago in the last century how well it does by itself to prevent election fraud. It is far better to extend the auditable portion of the data all the way through the election process to tabulation so that anyone could verify that the final count did in fact match the populous' intent.