A revolutionary new protocol called "3ballot" was introduced in September 2006 by MIT's Turing-award-winning cryptographer Ron Rivest. It accomplishes the seemingly incompatible goals of
1. Each voter's vote is secret, preventing vote-selling and coercion. 2. Each voter can verify that his vote was not discarded, and was correctly used and not altered, in the computation of the election result. (And if not, the voter is in a position to prove the vote counters cheated.) 3. Everybody can verify the election result was computed correctly. 4. Everybody can verify that extra fake "voters" were not added, and the full list of voters is publically known. 5. The whole protocol can be done without computers or cryptography - only low-tech devices like paper and pens are needed - and is so simple it can be understood by children. (It is, however, also possible to put in computers and cryptography; several flavors are possible.) Rivest's scheme is described for the layman at http://rangevoting.org/Rivest3B.html Interestingly, it turns out to work most naturally, securely, and simply, for approval voting and range voting. It still works - but less naturally, securely, and simply for plurality voting (the kind of voting currently most common throughout the USA and world) - and it essentially does not work at all for voting methods based on rank-order ballots such as instant runoff voting. The 3ballot technique could be the wave of the future in voting. WARREN D SMITH http://rangevoting.org <-- add your endorsement ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
