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

Re:How about

[switcha]

You get your fat ass away from monday night football for 30 minutes, drive down to the polling location, and vote.

The fogies in Fla missed voting correctly by about a 1/4 inch. You just missed voting correctly by 24 hours.

Re:Combination..

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not as simple as that. To prevent vote-selling, it can't be possible to someone to walk out the door with proof that they voted for a certain person. The press release gets further into these details; describing a convoluted two-piece receipt system.

Designed by Cryptographers, not Committees!

[Tackhead]

So a couple of noted cryptographers have come up with a secure, verifiable, electronic voting system and put the design out in the open for anyone to use. Like that was a challenge.

Like, hey, who the hell does this Rivest guy think he is, and what (apart from this stupid "Ph.D" stuff in "Computer Science" or "Mathematics" or "Cryptography", such a small title he has) makes him think he's any smarter than Penelope Bonsall, who's got a way cooler title "Director of the Office of Election Administration at the Federal Election Commission".

"The computer scientists are saying, 'The machinery you vote on is inaccurate and could be threatened; therefore, don't go. Your vote doesn't mean anything.'

Penelope Bonsall, Director of the Office of Election Administration at the Federal Election Commission, A Very Important Person Who's Smarter And Better Than Those Goofy Computer Scientists Because She Has A Bigger Title And Burns Through More Taxpayer Dollars In A Week Than That Rivest Dude Probably Generated In His Entire Working Career!

Rivest's system is clearly unworkable. Where's the wining and dining of sales reps? Where's the backroom deals involving hookers and cocaine? Where's the vendor-lock-in? Where are the service contracts and extra government departments required to oversee them? Oh, sure, Rivest can lay the smack down on "where's the beef" when it comes to building a secure and verifiable electronic voting system, but where's the pork?

Re:Combination..

[cjgross]

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

Re:Combination..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.