[Cryptography] cheap sources of entropy

[Jonathan Thornburg]

Bill Frantz wrote:
> Note that paper and human voting systems have been successfully
> attacked. My favorite attack occurred in Chicago in the mid-20th
> century. Ballot counters from one party glued pencil leads under
> their fingernails. When they counted a ballot for the "wrong"
> candidate, they marked an X for the correct candidate as well,
> thereby invalidating the ballot.

However -- and very much *unlike* electronic voting systems -- given
opposition-party scruitineers watching the counting process (and by
"watching" I mean literally looking over the shoulders of the ballot
counters), it's very hard to do such an attack on a *large scale* in
*secret*.

-- 
-- "Jonathan Thornburg [remove -animal to reply]" <jthorn at astro.indiana-zebra.edu>
   Dept of Astronomy & IUCSS, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA
   "There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched
    at any given moment.  How often, or on what system, the Thought Police
    plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.  It was even conceivable
    that they watched everybody all the time."  -- George Orwell, "1984"