Compliance Toolkit

Electronic voting: Moving beyond the ballot box

Tags:
Ballot Box,
Electronic Voting

Declan McCullagh CNET News

Published: 08 Jun 2004 16:20 BST

Computer scientists gathered in Piscataway, New Jersey, recently and bobbed their heads into an odd-looking contraption for a glimpse of emerging technology that might just help make the digital world safer for democracy.

Beneath the viridian green glow of a viewfinder flowed an inch-wide strip of paper that inventor David Chaum says will prove with mathematical rigor whether a vote cast on a computer in a ballot box has been tampered with after the fact.

The system was demonstrated publicly for the first time at a Rutgers University voting conference late last month. The technology builds on the increasingly popular notion that computerised voting machines need to leave behind a paper trail to safeguard against fraud -- something that's lacking in most current models and the subject of furious debate.

Chaum has raised the concept to an entirely new level, according to electronic-voting experts, by including breakthrough cryptographic techniques that will provide instant feedback on irregularities while ensuring voter anonymity. While still a clunky prototype, the system could represent the next evolutionary step in improving the security and reliability of the voting process, some believe.

"The math is fine," says Ron Rivest, a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the co-creator of the popular RSA encryption algorithm. "I view this as the early days of the practical applications...The paradigm is a new and interesting one. I'm optimistic."

Chaum is not alone among researchers vying to better voting's state of the art. Fed up with what they view as antediluvian punched cards and mechanical lever systems -- and with an eye to the problems of the 2000 Florida recount -- scientists are borrowing from decades of academic work to invent systems that are probably secure against malfeasance. Their inventions are also designed to one-up current electronic voting machines that have limited audit capabilities and may include bugs that surreptitiously alter vote totals.

"I'd like to think that we have some" influence, says Josh Benaloh, a cryptographer at Microsoft Research. "All acting en masse, maybe we'll have an impact."