| ▲ | tzs 2 hours ago | |
> Fill-in-the-bubble scantron systems are much faster and less error prone; not as fast as purely electronic voting, but you get a reliable paper trail that is more transparent and much easier to audit. An even bigger advantage of scantrol systems is with two simple changes to how ballots are produced and marked you can greatly increase the security and audibility of them. The two simple changes are: 1. When the ballots are printed you print some alphanumeric codes on them in an invisible ink, and 2. The voter fills in the bubble using a special marker provided at the polling place that turns the invisible code visible. The scanning machines themselves do not require any modification. Voters vote the same was as before, and can ignore the code that becomes visible in the bubbles they fill in if they way. By combining the clever chemistry used for the invisible ink and marker with some clever cryptography in how those codes are generated you can overlay and end-to-end auditable voting system on the scantron system. And end-to-end auditable voting system (also called and end-to-end voter verifiable system) has these properties: • Individuals can verify that their ballot was included in the final count and they vote was attributed correctly. • Any third party can verify that the ballots were counted correctly. The candidates, the parties, news organization, civil rights groups, and anyone else can check. • Voters cannot prove to third parties who they voted for. This is called coercion-resistance. Such a system was developed by several cryptographers, including David Chaum and Ron Rivest. It is called Scantegrity II [1] and has been used successfully in a few elections. Here are links to a paper by its creators explaining it, in HTML [2] and PDF [3]. Here's a paper [4] showing that it is coercion-resistant. With this system after the voting is done the election officials can publish all the codes that were revealed. A voter who wants to know if their vote was counted can check that list to see if the code that was revealed to them for that candidate is in the list. The election officials can also publish some more information that along with the code list allows anybody to verify that the totals for each candidate were right without this revealing the mapping from codes to candidates. With this we get all the pluses of paper system including hand recounts, plus fast machine counting that can be done with a simple single purpose machine that has no software that could be hacked, yet with the kind of end-to-end auditing that the electronic voting systems promise. And it inexpensive to implement and operate. Around half of the districts in the US already are using the scantron machines. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity [2] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c... [3] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c... | ||