[Cryptography] practical verifiable systems -- forensic and otherwise, cheap and otherwise

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 3 Mar 2015, Jonathan Thornburg wrote:

> > My favorite attack on paper systems was a piece of pencil "lead" glued 
> > under a finger nail on one of the vote counters. [...]
> 
> Assuming that none of the scrutineers (who are probably standing behind 
> the vote counter looking over her/his shoulder) notice, that strategy 
> can successfully attack the count at *one* polling place.  Unless 
> there's a *very* close race, this probably won't change the outcome.

Every time that I've scrutineered (here in Oz), the counters were sitting 
behind the table, whilst the scrutineers stood in front.

And yes, seats have depended upon the outcome of just one booth at times.  
One seat in particular was recounted about 3 or 4 times, with the result 
changing each time as ballots were challenged by the scrutineers; it was 
eventually settled by a mere 8 votes.

Ah, those were the days :-)

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Bliss is a MacBook with a FreeBSD server."
http://www.horsfall.org/spam.html (and check the home page whilst you're there)