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Because Scantegrity is an open system, the results of an election can be verified by completely independent auditors. Ben Adida, a fellow at Harvard University's Center for Research on Computation and Society, who is not involved with Scantegrity, plans to perform an audit to check the tallied results of the Takoma Park election. "The real issue with voting systems that don't have end-to-end verification is that you're quibbling and arguing about stuff, but you have no proof," Adida says.
In the case of the Florida elections, for example, Adida notes that voters could have been encouraged to use the system to make sure their votes were counted, and candidates could have checked the tallies.
Scantegrity is "the best of its kind that I've seen," adds Ben Bederson, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, College Park, who has studied election technologies extensively. "It strikes a pretty good balance of usability, security, and understandability, compared to other systems."
However, Bederson worries that the system may be too complicated for some voters. His research group has studied election auditing systems and found that "any verification significantly increases voters' need for help." Bederson is also concerned that, if voters need more help or take longer to cast votes, the system could contribute to higher costs for elections or long lines that might cause some people to give up and leave without voting.
"I hate to be critical of something that is so well-intended and is likely to actually increase security, but I don't think this is likely to be deployable on a large scale," Bederson says.
Nevertheless, Anne Sergeant, chair of the Takoma Park board of elections, says it's important for people to be able to check that their votes are counted as cast.
Before trying Scantegrity in an official election, the city held a mock vote in April to work out kinks in the system. In that test, she says, about 30 percent of participants went home and used the system to verify their votes. Sergeant says that Scantegrity representatives talked extensively with voters and election officials after the April test and have improved their system accordingly. "I hope we can provide an experience where people walk away and say, 'That was awesome,'" she says. "It's a goal to which we aspire."
The 2008 presidential election could be shaken by flawed electronic voting technology.
Experts say that when it comes to voting machines, usability issues should be as much of a concern as security.
Hi there,
The entire purpose of a system such as described above is to maintain the voter's privacy. My sources told me it's a trivial matter to make a verifiable voting system if you don't worry about privacy. The complexity of the scheme I described in this story was entirely caused by the need to maintain privacy in the process.
Even with the ballot serial number and the secret code, no one would be able to tell how the user voted.
The beauty of the system is that the validity of the process can be verified despite this fact. The links between secret codes and the results of voting can be confirmed _without_ actually tracing particular ballots to particular voting patterns.
This will work to verify that my vote was tallied the same way it was cast, but it doesn't appear to do anything for fraudulent ballot box stuffing. Since not every voter will verify their results, you can't determine that the unverified votes correspond to real voters. Is there something I'm missing?
The second commenter (the author?) said "Even with the ballot serial number and the secret code, no one would be able to tell how the user voted." But isn't that how the voter checks that the vote is properly recorded?
Receipts do not compromise anonymity or vote privacy
When a receipt is verified, you only get to see that the code corresponds to the one you jotted down at election time. Neither this code nor the receipt contains any information on *what* you voted for.
However, you know that the confirmation codes are different for each option. Therefore, if the confirmation codes match the ones you wrote down on your receipt, you know that your vote was counted. If they are not present, you know it was not. If they do not match, you can file an incidence, and prove that somebody switched your vote around.
And to avoid ballot-stuffing, you can ask for ballot pages to take with you home (and therefore not cast) -- if any of their codes show up as cast, you have evidence of malfeasance.
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uncleshred
1 Comment
A verifiable ballot is great at reducing one form of potential corruption. The downside is that it is then also possible for thugs to pressure or pay people to vote for a given candidate. The voter can be pressured to reveal his ballot code to demonstrate that he voted as told.
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