Shamos on paper trails and E2E April 21, 2008
Posted by Aleks Essex and in : Uncategorized , trackbackMichael 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 
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Comments»
I saw that on the John Adam’s series on HBO. I’m not sure if its true. I don’t really remember the scene all that well, but you got the idea that there was some arm twisting to make sure Washington’s electoral college count was sufficiently higher than Adams.
I found the whole thing fascinating, but wasn’t able to find any references about it.