FC: David Chaum's new project: Voting booths with secure receipts

[R. A. Hettinga]

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Status:  U
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 23:49:25 -0500
To: politech at politechbot.com
From: Declan McCullagh <declan at well.com>
Subject: FC: David Chaum's new project: Voting booths with secure receipts
Cc: david at surevote.com
Sender: owner-politech at politechbot.com
Reply-To: declan at well.com

[David Chaum is a remarkable fellow who pioneered digital cash. He's
recently been working on secure voting projects. See www.chaum.com and
Steven Levy's _Crypto_ book. --Declan]

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Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 15:36:24 -0800
To: Declan McCullagh <declan at well.com>
From: David Chaum <david at surevote.com>
Subject: Breakthrough allows first receipts from voting booths!

FOR IMMEDIATE  RELEASE
Breakthrough allows receipts from voting booths:
First-ever legal receipts are surprisingly powerful
-- and may be just in time!

Los Angles, CA - Receipts showing exactly who you voted for, just what
people want and expect these days, are generally outlawed to protect
against vote selling and other abuses; a scientist has, however, come up
with the first receipt that cannot be used for any such abuse and yet can
ensure that your vote is actually included in the final tally.
    The new type of receipt, which can be printed by a modified version of
familiar receipt printers, contains your vote -- but in a coded form. You
can read it clearly in the booth, when it is still printed on two layers.
When the layers are separated, either one you choose to take has the vote
information you saw coded in it, but it cannot be read (except by computers
run by election officials).
    When the votes have to be added up for the final tally, the actual
receipts posted on an official public website are the input to the process.
The results of the process are then subject to a public audit. A lotto-like
draw selects which items must be decrypted, but never enough to compromise
privacy. Anyone with a pc can then check all the decryptions published on
the website and thereby verify that the final tally must be correct. The
audit is so strong that it cannot be fooled by breaking any code or
malicious software running on voting machines.
    The cryptographer, Dr. David Chaum, known for inventing eCash and his
pioneering company DigiCash, who came up with the receipt system said "The
more you look into how elections are actually run, even in this country,
the clearer the gap becomes between the way it is done and what we could
and really should be doing". Chaum also said "Today's trusted black-box
mentality has led to very high costs, meaning computerized voting mainly
for rich counties, an utter lack of real control and no way to re-deploy
the hardware for schools and libraries."
    At a time when the House has passed the first ever federal subsidy, at
$2.65b, and a similar bill is on the Senate floor with a $3.5b price tag,
one has to wonder: Will receipts and other new solutions have a chance, or
will the subsides backfire and put currently-certified computerized systems
in place on such a scale that major change will be a very long way off?
There is a complex interlocking of state and federal laws, agencies, and
quasi-governmental bodies that has erected a set of design specifications
and time-consuming steps that only new systems must navigate, first at the
federal level and then for most states separately. "When this was all first
set up more than a decade ago" Chaum quipped, "the rationale was to keep
unscrupulous vendors out, now it may just keep innovation out."

Contact: David Chaum, SureVote:
(818) 512-1024 (cellular/voicemail) david at survote.com
Jim Dolbear, Larkin Associates:
(310) 621-3580 (cellular/voicemail) jim at larkin.com




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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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