] Fully electronic systems do not provide any way that the
] voter can truly verify that the ballot cast corresponds
] to that being recorded, transmitted, or tabulated. 

Lots of links to resources on electronic voting systems on this site if you dig around.

Voting systems are easy to manipulate, whether you are building misleading ballots, stuffing ballot boxes, flyering the inner city with notices about the election that include the wrong date, or simply paying off some friends in hollywood to run against you so that the serious candidates are forced to back down. :)

Its very difficult to build a ballot that cannot be stuffed. Tying things to drivers licenses is not enough. Creating all kinds of fake drivers in a district is really easy to do, and the people in a position to do it also run the election. Answers here are really hard to come by. You could publish a list of every voter's address. People could verify that the number of voters is the same as the number of votes. People could also attempt to audit this data independently. Run, for example, some software that correlates the addresses with physical space using a mapquest database in order to make sure that the people live at real addresses that don't overlap and that the population densities aren't out of whack. This might be a resource for spammers, but then again, so is the phonebook. In many states the voter registration lists are already available to political parties. Its just a matter of putting it online.

As for the votes themselves, all the security experts here argue for paper validated audit trails. Now, versus some questionably designed electronic system, yeah, I can see that being useful, but I don't share their agreement that electronic voting systems are bad, for one reason that I don't think they are considering.

Why not publish all the votes on the Internet? Why is the counting process always something that happens in a back room of a high school by a bunch of "bipartisan" old ladies?

When I vote, I get a random number. I can go on the website later and verify that my random number got tabulated correctly. I can count all the votes on the website using my own software and decide for myself who won the election.

The subject of voter coercion comes up. It always does. This is probably the least common and most difficult way of manipulating an election, and yet people always raise it. So, we have systems that are secure against voter coercion but not secure against ballot stuffing. Sigh...

If you want to protect against that in this system, you need only publish some of the votes immediately for people in the voting booths. If they don't want to tell the person coercing them what their random number was, they can simply hand out another random number that has the vote the coercor is looking for.

So, in sum, I think that electronic voting systems can be much more secure then any existing paper or ele... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]