“Did Your Vote Count? New Coded Ballots May Prove It Did”
[This sounds like a credible solution, put together by credible players in the computer science community. -Thomas]
This is a summary of the long article that I sent to you yesterday. I consider this to be a significant advance (assuming all this is confirmed by the computer science community) in voting machine security technology, which would not require a paper ballot backup, but would use cryptographic techniques.
Norman Turrill
Voter Service Chair and Board Member, LWV of Oregon
DNet Administrator and Board Member, LWV of Portland Oregon
“Did Your Vote Count? New Coded Ballots May Prove It Did”
New York Times (03/02/04) P. D2; Robinson, Sara
A truly trustworthy voting system must furnish a voter-verifiable audit trail and maintain the secrecy of ballots, and various systems have been proposed. The “frog” voting system suggested in a working paper from the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project in 2001 and modified for an all-electronic approach would employ two distinctive e-voting
machines and a “frog” memory card: Voters would first obtain a frog that features all ballot options, and then use the first e-voting machine to make their choices; on election day, the voters would plug the frog, with its stored choices, into a “vote caster” machine that would display their selections on a screen, and once voters are satisfied they would cast the vote, putting the frog into a “frozen” mode that renders its data alteration-proof and placing the memory card into the ballot box. The vote caster, unlike the first voting machine, would need to be heavily secure, but researchers believe a simple design would ensure security. To guarantee that votes are accurately tallied, VoteHere chief scientist Dr. C. Andrew Neff and cryptographer Dr. David Chaum have devised two separate mathematical voting systems.
Both systems require the counting process to be conducted publicly over the Internet, with election integrity upheld by voters and third party observers and ballot confidentiality supported by election officials. Once voting is complete, each voter would be given an encrypted receipt that can only be decrypted via a collaborative venture between all election trustees; all receipts would be published online following the closing of the polls, and voters would be able to find an image of their individual receipts and verify their accuracy using their serial numbers. Decoded ballots would be posted online without serial numbers so that they could not be linked to individual voters. Some researchers think the complexity of the cryptographic systems could undermine their acceptance by the voting public.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/02/science/02VOTE.html
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