Slashdot Mirror
All Fifty States May Face Voting Machine Lawsuit
according to an announcement made by activist Bernie Ellis at the premier of David Earnhardt's film "Uncounted [The Movie]" all fifty states could be receiving subpoenas in the National Clean Election lawsuit. The documentary film, like the lawsuit, takes a look at the issue of voting machine failure and the need for a solid paper trail. "The lawsuit is aimed at prohibiting the use of all types of vote counting machines, and requiring hand-counting of all primary and general election ballots in full view of the public. The lawsuit has raised significant constitutional questions challenging the generally accepted practices of state election officials of relying on "black box" voting machines to record and count the votes at each polling station, and allow tallying of votes by election officials outside the view of the general public."
I used to think this as well, but then I saw a talk by a Ben Adida, a cryptographic voting researcher. It turns out there are electronic and hybrid voting systems that allow every step of the process to be independently audited. Individual voters can log into a website and ensure that their vote was recorded correctly (and yes, this is done in such a way that nobody can prove to another party which way they voted). Anyone can get a list of the people who actually voted, so they can check that nobody voted twice and that every voter was valid. Each of the candidates can independently and programatically verify that the tallying was done correctly (again, without exposing any one specific ballot). This is far superior to traditional paper ballots, and there's no technical reason we can't have it today.
Here's a paper that gives some more information. I believe Dr. Adida mentioned that this particular system has a few problems that would prevent it from being used in practice, but it still gives a pretty good example of how a cryptographic voting system could work.