Verifiable Elections Via Cryptography

An anonymous reader writes, "Cryptographer David Chaum and his research team have invented a new voting protocol which allows voters to verify that their vote has been correctly cast and counted. This is enabled using a surprisingly low-tech technique of cryptographic secret sharing. The secret — your marked ballot — is split into two halves using a hole punch" You take half home and can verify later via a Web interface how your particular ballot was counted.

Comments

Re:Start your biding...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ill bring my lawyer instead, i think ill looking into expensive homes with beutyful senery.

HBO's "Hacking Democracy" available on Google Vide

[Anonymous Coward]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-723679120 7107726851&q=hacking+democracy

Re:And numbered non-sequentially.

[Catskul]

This is stupid. Rather than go through all of that, why not just focus on getting the basics done and done right? Leave "verified" voting until after we've managed to identify who can vote and that their votes are actually counted.

You are so right... how stupid for those cryptographers to be doing research that might improve voting verification when we haven't even cured cancer yet.

Re:Start your biding...

[neoform]

Funny how in a government with a GDP of $11,000,000,000,000 it takes programmers working for free to make a system that is actually secure in order to maintain democracy..

Shame is the only thing I feel right now.

Handcounting: How Slow Is It?

[kthejoker]

My district has roughly 650,000 voters in it.

Let's assume we have the best turnout in a non-Presidential election in the past 40 years: 54%. That's highly unlikely - no one's really contesting in my district (our guy's an old time shoo-in) - but who knows? People might show up.

54% of 650,000 = 350,000, give or take a few.

How long would it take to count 350,000 votes for something?

Let's assume a person can count 1 vote every 3 seconds. Count it out loud. "1. 2. 3." It's pretty slow, actually, but let's be fair: some of our more civic-minded people are also some of our eldest, and they're a bit slow.

So 1 vote every 3 seconds, that's 20 votes a minute, which is 1200 votes an hour.

350,000 / 1200 = 291 man hours.

In 8 hour shifts, that's 37 people. And considering my district is spread out over 30 towns, that's roughly 1 person per city - 2 for some of the larger ones. Find 37 more people and you've even got redundancy.

And that's if you want it done in one day.

How about the Presidential election? 2004 was considered a banner year for turnout. Number of voters? 122,294,978. We'll round it down to 120 million. Again, 1200 votes an hour: that's 100,000 man hours.

8 hour shifts, that's 12,500 people. Again, that's in 8 hours, reading 1 vote every 3 seconds. If you got it down to 1 vote every 2.5 seconds (and trust me, when things are repetitive, it's easy to speed through), suddenly you only need 10,417 people.

You've just laid off 2,100 poll workers in half a second.

There is no reason at all for a backlash against paper balloting. It is quick enough. In fact that should be the motto for all paper balloting:

PAPER Balloting: It's Quick Enough.(TM)

Re:which is precisely what we DON'T want

[frdmfghtr]

Go read their faq. This system is better and simpler. It even allows potentially for ballots to be reconstructed from the receipts if the polling place was blown of the face of the earth.

Simpler? How do you get simpler than putting a big black "X" next to your selection on a ballot and dropping it in a locked box? Lining up holes, encrypted receipts, there is NO NEED to make things this complicated.

Remember: KISS