voting

[Trei, Peter]

> Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
I think Perry has hit it on the head, with the one exception that
the voter should never have the receipt in his hand - that opens
the way for serial voting fraud.

The receipt should be exposed to the voter behind glass, and
when he/she presses the 'accept' button, it visibly drops into 
the sealed, opaque ballot box.

Peter

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