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| (US) 11/06 - Punchscan election syst... |
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Mikko H
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Mikkoh
Post Number: 3
Registered: 11-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Tuesday, November 7, 2006 - 2:27 pm: | 
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I came across a link to the website of the Punchscan election system. See
http://www.punchscan.org/
for more. I posted this to another discussion also. Sorry about cross-posting, but I think this is something that the activists might want to pay attention to (I'm not in the US myself).
The system is designed by cryptographers and computer scientists. It uses a clever method that allows the voters to easily verify after the fact that their ballot was correctly counted, without compromising the privacy of the vote. This depends on the fact that the ballots have a serial number, and the system includes a method for the candidates to verify, before the election, that the ballots have been created without tampering, and, after the election, that they have been counted correctly. The system has been used succesfully in university elections.
Please see the website for more. There are nice, detailed flash video presentations of how the system works.
Even if Punchscan includes some relatively complex software, it seems to be worlds better than the systems that are currently in use in the US. The software is open source and the system is such that the candidates and test labs could write their own code to create automated checks of the system. All parts of the system are verifiable by either the voters or the candidates. Cryptography and mathematics are employed to make sure that any tampering will almost certainly be discovered.
I do not know how difficult it would be to convince officials and the local governments to use something like Punchscan. Some parts of the method may seem difficult to understand at first. Then again, nobody seems to be able to make sense of the current system, either. |
Craig Bergren
Voting Rights Forum Participant
Username: Babyhuey
Post Number: 11
Registered: 11-2006
Best of Black Box? N/A
Votes: 0 (A keeper?) | | Posted on Wednesday, November 8, 2006 - 11:53 pm: |
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Mikko,
Punchscan seems to fix my concerns about having the ability to verify my vote and eliminates the need for there to be a second data stream. The thugs can't see how I vote. I'm sure it also works for races with more than two candidates and elections where there is proportional voting (select 1,2 or 3 of ten candidates), but the web site doesn't show anything about that, or did I miss it?
Craig |
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