Transparent, High Integrity, Open Source Elections

I like this much better than Chaum's previous proposals. Relatively speaking its actually quite simple. You could really deploy this.

This is very similar to a proposal that I made on this website back in 2003.

The cool aspect is that you go home with a receipt. You can log into a website and verify that your vote was logged correctly, and you can download the complete election results and count them yourself with your own software, so you don't have to trust someone else to count them correctly.

Furthermore, you cannot prove to anyone else that you voted for a particular candidate, which makes it impossible for anyone to influence your vote. The candidates need to perform some random auditing to verify that the votes have been applied to the correct candidates, so you have to trust that the candidates:

1. Aren't colluding to throw the election.
2. Haven't screwed up their audits.
3. Haven't been fooled by some sleight of hand on the part of the system operators.

However, I think these are acceptable risks, at least in the west. The existance of all of these things creates, I think, and effective deterrent against fraud in the counting process, particularly with electronic machines. Its also a hell of a lot cheaper and more accurate than the paper audit trail "high school gym full of old ladies" counting process that many voting advocates seem enamored with.

The other issue, which I cover in my proposal, is that the count of registered voters needs to sync with the count of votes cast, and the people voting need to be alive, etc... To be honest, I think thats likely a much larger source of fraud than then actual counting process...

On slashdot people are calling this snake oil. That community is really getting worthless as a litmus of what real technical people think. Unfortunately, I worry that if they don't get it, the general population won't get it either... I think this could actually get a better recpetion in practice than it has had on Slashdot, but you'd really need communities like that to get behind doing the auditing... Its a shame they couldn't be bothered to read the things they are commenting on.

Punchscan.org