BBV - A Secure and Verifiable Voting System

because it is simpler.

You cast your vote on a machine similar to the current ones. It spits out a barcode with your votes encoded on it.

You take the card to a second machine, which is a barcode reader. It shows your vote on the screen. If it’s wrong, you tell it to shred it, and go vote again. If it’s OK, it spits the card back out, and you deposit it in the ballot box as a record to be used for recounts. The official electronic version of the vote is stored in the barcode reader, not the machine you enter your choices on.

This should eliminate random machine errors. They would be noticed.

As far as deliberate vote flipping: Both machines would have to be programmed to flip certain votes. This adds to the complexity of an attempt to manipulate the votes, reducing the chances of it happening. Flipping every vote would be very obvious, so only flipping certain votes would be the area that needs to be detected. The barcode itself would have to tell the second machine that “this vote is to be flipped”. So the first machine would have to flip the vote, show the intended vote on the screen, and print an instruction in the barcode that this is a flipped vote. (Who’s gonna try to get away with a printed permanent record of trying to flip votes?) Then, the second machine has to read the flipping instruction, and be capable of showing the intended vote again, despite a different vote being encoded for counting. So the intended vote MUST be shown in the barcode somewhere. Complicated and risky.

And finally, with a convenient, coded card available for recounts, they can be done quickly and easily. Therefore, we can facilitate mandatory random recounts of the cards without stress to the system. This can be done on yet another machine, which could be a very simple barcode reader only. The software for this should be open source, and probably substantially exists. Even if the flipping is occurring in the central compiling computer, these random, localized, recounts should show any problems, and will go a long way towards prevention just by being there.

to be free from bugs and portray on the screen what it's actually recording in the database.