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Verifiable Elections Via Cryptography

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the but-suppose-they-don't-want-to-make-cheating-impossible? dept.

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.

1 of 409 comments (clear)

  1. which is precisely what we DON'T want by caudron · · Score: 0, Redundant

    If you can show how you specifically voted outside the voting booth, then you can sell your vote or (arguably) worse can have your vote coerced away from you.

    You want to see how you voted, then print a paper ballot from the machine that shows---IN PLAIN TEXT---what your vote was. Place that paper in the ballot box. The paper is anonymous. You don't carry home a receipt. If the vote needs to be recounted by hand any volunteer with an 85 or higher I.Q. can be employed to do a manual recount based on the plain text version to compare against to ballot box's count of bar codes. If they don't agree, something went awry.

    This is simple stuff. We don't need encryption, web 2.0 interfaces, juggling monkeys, or moon rock sculptures! We need 3 things:

    1) a way for the computer to count fast (barcode or some such)
    2) a way for the voter to see what he's voted for (plain text on the same bar coded ballot)
    3) a way to do a manual recount for verification (see "plain text" comment above

    Tom Caudron
    http://tom.digitalelite.com/

    --
    -Tom