Maryland Voters Test New Cryptographic Voting System

Source: Wired

It’s an election system voters and math geeks can embrace.

On Tuesday voters in Takoma Park, Maryland, got to try out a new, transparent voting system that lets voters go online to verify that their ballots got counted in the final tally. The system also lets anyone independently audit election results to verify the votes went to the correct candidates.

The open source, optical-scan system, called Scantegrity, was developed by cryptographer David Chaum, with researchers from MIT, the University of Maryland in Baltimore, George Washington University, the University of Ottawa and the University of Waterloo. It’s similar to another system, called Punchscan, that won the researchers $10,000 in 2007 at a voting machine competition sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Although the system is highly technical, the experience for voters is the same as with any other optical-scan system.

Read more: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/11/scantegrity

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Looks promising, no?

that they voted for X, they can collect payment.

Vote buyers in other countries simply accept cellphone photos of filled ballots as proof, before dispensing the cash.
This system is intended to prove to the voter that his vote was counted correctly. But it also can be used as a check
of integrity of election as a whole. If many voters find errors, which they can prove by keeping a copy of their ballots,
the final results can be corrected or, at least, declared invalid.

Any ballot being photographed will be replaced by a fresh ballot. Anyone using a pre-printed ballot gets a fresh ballot. It can be reloaded with previous choices, but the machine at the polling place won't print a new fresh ballot until a certain time elapses.

That stops vote buying.

And, who cares if you can see your own once cast ballot across the internet when it does not mean it was actually counted as it appears regurgitated electronically. All it means it that someone retained a copy, attached to a unique number, not that they added it to the count correctly.

It is best to see all the anonymous ballots anonymously, not one stinky little ballot.

The ballots should be marked with a marred stamp, marred further at the end of the day, and laced with trace elements that can check if those ballots were indeed from that day and under the poll workers from that day in case of ballot validity questions.

... I get to see my ballot again. How paltry, what bullshit.

:thumbsup:

looks like they are informed consumers now.

Depends on what the Md Senate Republics do about it.

They killed the paper ballot initiative, which passed the Md house by unanimous vote.

-Hoot

It should go without saying that any usage of the word 'informed' excludes Repugs.

The wingnuttiest Repugs, of course, are 'infromed'. :) (I like that word -- it sounds sort of like 'inflamed'.)