Recent Blog Posts

CCC’s 25C3 and e-voting: Man versteht das was man kennt
01/05/2009
Question: With respect to voters’ ability to comprehend the process, which voting system was deemed too complicated to understand? Was it: a) Ulrich Wiesner’s assessment of Punchscan, ThreeBallot and BingoVoting at the recent Chaos Communication ...
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How many politicians does it take to ElGamal encrypt a lightbulb?
12/04/2008
Methods for performing end-to-end election verification without the use of public key cryptography have existed for several years now: Punchscan, Scantegrity I/II, ThreeBallot, VaV, Twin, Aperio. Conversely, end-to-end proposals that are based on public key ...
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If they were my ballots to count…
11/21/2008
Over on Freedom to Tinker, Ed has some images of contested ballots from the Minnesota recount. Minneosta Public Radio offers a host of other images. Minnesota law states: If a ballot is marked by distinguishing characteristics in a manner making it evident ...
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My Day as an Election Judge in the 2008 Election
11/06/2008
I had meant to post this yesterday, but I woke up not feeling well and spent the day in bed. I see that Ben Adida and Avi Rubin have already posted their experiences. Aleks Essex also posted his experiences a few weeks ago when he was a worker for the most ...
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What is Punchscan?

Punchscan is the first vote capture system to offer fully end-to-end (E2E) verifiability of election results. Punchscan moves beyond ordinary paper audit trails offering a far more robust and available way for voters to become involved in the election oversight process.


Election Day at the University of Ottawa
Punchscan runs the GSAED Election [More Details]

Punchscan Voting in a Nutshell

  • Voter experience: casting and checking your vote in a Punchscan election is easy! [View]
  • Punchscan on a sheet: see the Punchscan election process summarized on a single printable sheet of paper. [PDF] [PNG]

What is E2E, and why is it Important?

End-to-end cryptographic independent verification, or E2E, is a mechanism built into an election that allows voters to take a piece of the ballot home with them as a receipt. This receipt does not allow voters to prove to others how they voted, but it does permit them to:

  • Verify that they have properly indicated their votes to election officials (cast-as-intended).
  • Verify with extremely high assurance that all votes were counted properly (counted-as-cast).

Voters can check that their vote actually made it to the tally, and that the election was conducted fairly.

Punchscan is an international open-source project headed by esteemed cryptographer David Chaum and includes researchers from the University of Maryland-Baltimore County (UMBC), George Washington University (GWU), University of Ottawa (UO) and University of Waterloo (UW).