[extropy-chat] A Secure and Verifiable Voting System

[Giu1i0 Pri5c0]

>From Slashdot: The cryptographer David Chaum, through discussion with top
cryptographers such as Ron Rivest, has designed a secure and verifiable
voting system. One of the goals of his design is that anyone can verify that
votes were tabulated correctly. It's good to see real security/crypto people
working on this problem. Their website vreceipt.com has a whitepaper and a
press release.
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.

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