Charlie,
I strongly concur vis crypto methods. They remove control
from the voter. This is the fact that is missed by the anti-paper
crowd. A human voter - un-aided by any device - can verify
and confirm a piece of paper - and that paper cannot be altered by
digital means (mechanical yes - but not digital). Anything else
requires the human to trust the device that is interceding between them
and their vote.
I also agree vis accountability and traceability - when you
put your ballot into a box - you are implicitly trusting that all paper
in that box will be treated equally - including yours - but not yours
separately from the rest!
Now on to audits - yes - open auditability is crucial. The
OASIS EML process and XML formats go to great lengths to create open
auditability. It's a given that ballot records should be
transparent - and not contain proprietary values that only a handful of
people know what they represent. Having open internationally
recognized standards for voting records again appears like a
pre-requisite.
I have worked hard at creating counting and audit mechanisms in the
EMLvoting.org software design - to ensure:
a) counting is anonymous - and revealing of actual entities is only
done as the very last step - in presenting the totals.
b) This is all open source and open design to match OASIS EML
specifications.
c) individual XML records can be matched to paper records -
providing two separate counting paths that should then match.
This an 8th grader can grok - count this pile of things - count this
other pile of things - two piles should be the same. Each digital
record is tagged so it can be verified with paper similarly
tagged.
The principles here are just the same as banking - you always need
two sources of record - checks and ledgers - and two or more
independent controllers - to make collusion difficult. NIST have
recognized this in their work on DREs and trust. So I have the
means to crosscheck digital ballot records with paper.
Right now I'm very comfortable that by using OASIS EML, XML and
paper I can create an open trusted election for any voting model out
there - that can be independently audited and verified.
What we need now is more adoption and more implementations.
DW
"The way to be is to do" - Confucius (551-472
B.C.)
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Received on Sun Dec 31 23:17:10 2006