Los Angles, CA: Receipts showing exactly who you voted for—just what people want and generally expect these days—have been outlawed to prevent vote selling and other abuses; now a scientist has come up with the first receipt that cannot be abused and additionally ensures that the vote you see on it is actually included in the final tally.
The new type of receipt is printed in two layers by a modified version of familiar receipt printers. You can read it clearly in the booth, but before leaving, you must separate the layers and choose which one to keep. Either one you take has the vote information you saw coded in it, but it cannot be read (except with numeric keys divided among computers run by election officials).
The half you take is supplied digitally by the voting machine for publication on an official election website. These posted receipts are the input to the process of making the final tally. A lotto-like draw selects points in the process that must be decrypted for inspection, but not so many points as to compromise privacy. Anyone with a PC can then use simple software to check all such decryptions published on the website and thereby verify that the final tally must be correct. Such audit cannot be fooled, no matter how many voting machines or other election computers are compromised or how clever or well-resourced the attack.
The cryptographer, Dr. David Chaum, known as the inventor of eCash and for his pioneering company DigiCash, came up with the system. He said “The more you look into how elections are actually run, even in this country, the more shameful the gap between what’s done and what we could and really should be doing.” Chaum also said “Today’s trusted black-box mentality has led to very high costs, meaning computerized voting mainly for rich counties, an utter lack of real control, and no way to re-deploy the hardware for other purposes such as schools or libraries.”
At a time when the House of Representatives has passed the first-ever federal subsidy for voting, at $2.65b, and a similar bill is on the Senate floor with a $3.5b price tag, one has to wonder: Will receipts and other new solutions have a chance, or will the subsides backfire and put currently-certified computerized systems in place on such a scale that major change will be a very long way off? There is a complex interlocking of state laws, federal agencies, and quasi-governmental bodies that has erected a set of design specifications and time-consuming steps that new systems must navigate, first at the federal level and then for most states separately. “When this was all set up more than a decade ago” Chaum quipped, “the rationale was to keep unscrupulous vendors out, now it may just keep innovation out.”
For further information, see the white paper.