Shamos on paper trails and E2E April 21, 2008
Posted by Aleks Essex and in : Uncategorized , 1 comment so farMichael Shamos of Carnegie Mellon had this to say today in an interview with cnet:
The fundamental difficulty with paper trails is that they’re ridiculously kludgey. The problem is that once you mandate paper trails, it cuts off research. There would be no reason to use anything else because it would be illegal.
What we really want are end-to-end verification systems. I want to be able to tell that my vote was counted. These paper trails do not provide end-to-end verification. No serious manufacturer is working on end-to-end verification. We’re not making any progress toward that end except in the theoretical journals.
That’s ok, because it turns out you can have paper-trails that are end-to-end verifiable—that is to say, carry the end-to-end integrity verification properties of the cryptographic systems—but use only paper.
Rick told me the other day about some alleged scandal that George Washington didn’t win over John Adams by nearly as wide a margin as the official historic account indicated. I think it’s interesting to realize that they could’ve been running end-to-end verifiable elections with eighteenth century technology.
I also think this observation lends to the credibility of its cryptographic counterparts, that the concept transcends the technology that realizes it.
Keep watching those journals to find out what I’m talking about 
The content of posts to the Punchscan blog belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts, feelings, or opinions of the Punchscan voting project.
OCLUG Mock Election April 7, 2008
Posted by Aleks Essex in : Elections, Voting Events , add a commentOur friends at the Ottawa Canada Linux Users Group kindly invited Rick and I to give a talk at their annual general meeting in which we demonstrated Scantegrity II. We conducted a mock election of their board of directors in part to demonstrate our invisible ink printing capability as well as to gather some preliminary feedback about the voting experience.
Their response seems promising. Though not a statistically significant sample, all survey respondees indicated they were “confident that I filled out my ballot correctly.” This obviously cannot be taken as an indication of overall usability. I do however think it demonstrates at least that we’ve moved past the usability restrictions of the Punchscan ballot and are on to other topics of discussion.
Also of note was that most respondees would consider using (and/or authoring) an open source software tool for the cryptographic integrity check. I think this is the more academically interesting question. The voting process itself is a bare minimum in terms of overall usability requirements. However it is the people performing the E2E verification steps that give this technology its raison d’être, so we’d hope they would be reasonably able to understand the purpose of, and use, the receipt check/audit tools.
Photos of the event can be seen here.
Aleks and Rick speaking at the OCLUG AGM. (Photo courtesy of Richard Guy Briggs)
Voting with Scantegrity II. (Photo courtesy of Richard Guy Briggs)
Invisible ink print setup: Off-the-shelf inkjet printer, continuous-feed ink system (for bulk specialty invisible ink).
A marked OCLUG mock ballot showing confirmation codes and voter generated receipt.
The content of posts to the Punchscan blog belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the thoughts, feelings, or opinions of the Punchscan voting project.