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...

[aprilsound]

Actualy if we all went and RTFA first, we would see that they have solved the problem. You can't prove how you voted to someone who didn't see the other half of the ballot you voted with.

This system prevents that problem

[billstewart]

David Chaum's done a lot of work on the topic of secure voting, and this is a really cool simplification of some of his earlier work. It's nice and low-tech, and still does the job. If you go read the Punchscan.org FAQ, the second item is about preventing coercion and verifiable-vote-buying.

Of course, this doesn't prevent traditional vote-tampering methods from working, like

• TV commercials scaring voters about the other parties, or
• politicians making bogus promises, or
• dead people voting (as long as people with their names show up to vote), or
• election departments not providing enough voting machines or ballots at heavily-one-party-dominated precincts, or
• election officials invalidating registrations of people in the wrong party, or
• police harassing motorists in black areas on the way to the polls, etc.

But at least it's better than Diebold.

Everyone has so far completely missed the point!

[X-treme-LLama]

Good lord! How is it that 70% of people have completely missed the point?

This system DOES NOT allow ANYONE to see WHOM you voted for.

That's right. NO ONE short of the people in charge can see who you voted for. You boss can't make you prove it, nor can your spouse, or whoever else.

All the ballot half you keep records is that you voted A, B, B, A. All you can verify online is that your vote was recorded as A, B, B, A. Because the ballot choices are randomized, no one can tell who A was for your particular ballot. Ahh, but I already hear the tin-foil brigade saying: "But the people in charge can check!!" Really, how? The ID # of your ballot isn't recorded next to your name in the voter rolls, I suppose someone who had access to all the decryption keys could fingerprint each and every ballot, but anyone who can get ahold of any of the paper ballots can do that now. Is it no less secure than any traditional method of voting, and superior in a vast number of ways. As long as a few percent of people check that their votes match what they recorded, elections will be a lot closer to tamper-proof.

How did so many people fail to figure all that out?

Re:Start your biding...

[ralphbecket]

If you had read the paper (it isn't complicated) you would know that
- you can only verify that the mark you made was the mark that was recorded, you cannot verify which option you marked
- the auditors (normally the candidates) randomly sample the ballots before and after the election in such a way that they can verify statistically that counting proceeded fairly without violating voter anonymity. The chance of k miscounted votes going undetected is 1/2^k, so just thirty miscounted votes will have less than one in a billion chance of going unnoticed.

What on Earth does this system have to do with touch screens?

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.

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)