e voting

[Bill Frantz]

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


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