voting

[Perry E. Metzger]

I'm a believer in the KISS principle.

A ballot that is both machine and human readable and is constructed by
machine seems ideal. You enter your votes, a card drops down, you
verify it and drop it in a slot. Ideally, the cards would be marked
with something like OCR-B so that the correspondence between machine
marking and human marking is trivial.

You can't have "hanging chads" or mismarks on optical cards because a
machine marks it for you. You can always do a recount, just by running
the cards through the reader again. You can prevent ballot stuffing by
having representatives of several parties physically present during
the handling of the ballot boxes -- just like now. You can verify that
the counting mechanisms are working right by manually counting if
needed.

Complicated systems are the bane of security. Systems like this are
simple to understand, simple to audit, simple to guard.


-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com