At 9:19 AM -0800 11/21/03, Tim May wrote:
On Nov 21, 2003, at 8:16 AM, Major Variola (ret.) wrote:
Secretary of State Kevin Shelley is expected to announce today that as of 2006, all electronic voting machines in California must be able to produce a paper printout that voters can check to make sure their votes are properly recorded.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-shelley21nov21,1,847438.story? coll=la-headlines-california
Without the ability to (untraceably, unlinkably, of course) verify that this vote is "in the vote total," and that no votes other than those who actually voted, are in the vote total, this is all meaningless.
David Chaum has described a system where each voter gets a piece of paper which includes their vote, encrypted so they can't prove how they voted. The images of these pieces of paper are also posted on a web page, so the voters can look up their encrypted ballots to verify that their votes are being counted. These votes are passed through a number of mixes, which may be run by different organizations before they are completely decrypted and counted. (The mixes prevent a decrypted ballot from being associated with an input, encrypted ballot.) The encryption of the ballots is performed by over-printing the plain-text ballots, so the voter can verify the ballot's correctness before it is encrypted. The mixes are verified by random inspection. This system seems to meet the above requirements. Now, I can think of some ways to cheat with this system, but they are all a lot more likely to be found than cheats with the current systems. The big knock on all-electronic voting machines is that they are a step backwards in independent verification and audit from paper ballots, or even punch cards. (Yes, you can argue about hanging chad, pregnant chad, dimpled chad etc., but at least you have something tangible that represents each ballot.) The saving grace of the old mechanical voting machines is that they are mechanical, and hard to modify for cheating. Most anyone on this list can imagine the program in an electronic voting machine being different from the one that was audited and approved. That's hard to do with a mechanical system. We have seen failures where the mechanical systems lost all the votes made on them however, a failure that seems possible with the electronic systems as well. IMHO, the problem with Chaum's systems is that it is complex. I think that saving a printed paper ballot, along with the electronic totals, gives much the same level of security and assurance, with a system that the average voter can understand. Cheers - Bill ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | "There's nothing so clear as a | Periwinkle (408)356-8506 | vague idea you haven't written | 16345 Englewood Ave www.pwpconsult.com | down yet." -- Dean Tribble | Los Gatos, CA 95032