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High hopes for unscrambling the vote
By Declan McCullagh
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-5227789.html
Story last modified June 8, 2004, 4:00 AM PDT
PISCATAWAY, N.J.--Computer scientists gathered here recently and bobbed
their heads into an odd-looking contraption for a glimpse of emerging
technology that might just help make the digital world safer for democracy.
Beneath the viridian green glow of a viewfinder flowed an inch-wide strip
of paper that inventor David Chaum says will prove with mathematical rigor
whether a vote cast on a computer in a ballot box has been tampered with
after the fact.
The system was demonstrated publicly for the first time at a Rutgers
University voting conference late last month. The technology builds on the
increasingly popular notion that computerized voting machines need to leave
behind a paper trail to safeguard against fraud--something that's lacking
in most current models and the subject of furious debate.
News.context
What's new:
Computer scientists are developing cryptography techniques that promise
powerful new tools for verifying computerized voting results.
Bottom line:The technology is still in its prototype stage--but a bigger
obstacle may be whether notoriously conservative voting officials can be
convinced to try something new.
More stories on this topic
Chaum has raised the concept to an entirely new level, according to
electronic-voting experts, by including breakthrough cryptographic
techniques that will provide instant feedback on irregularities while
ensuring voter anonymity. While still a clunky prototype, the system could
represent the next evolutionary step in improving the security and
reliability of the voting process, some believe.
The math is fine, said Ron Rivest, a professor of computer science at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the co-creator of the popular
RSA encryption algorithm. I view this as the early days of the practical
applications...The paradigm is a new and interesting one. I'm optimistic.
Chaum is not alone among researchers vying to better voting's state of the
art. Fed up with what they view as antediluvian punched cards and
mechanical lever systems--and with an eye to the problems of the 2000
Florida recount--scientists are borrowing from decades of academic work to
invent systems that are probably secure against malfeasance. Their
inventions are also designed to one-up current electronic voting machines
that have limited audit capabilities and may include bugs that
surreptitiously alter vote totals.
I'd like to think that we have some influence, said Josh Benaloh, a
cryptographer at Microsoft Research. All acting en masse, maybe we'll have
an impact.
Encrypted receipts
The leading contenders so far, independently created by Chaum and
mathematician Andrew Neff, represent two variants of a voting technology
that uses encrypted printed receipts to solve many of the problems that
have bedeviled existing hardware. These prototypes work in the lab. But one
obstacle may be whether notoriously conservative voting officials can be
convinced to try something new.
The idea of having computerized voting machines produce paper receipts,
providing a physical record that can be audited, is belived among voting
experts to be a useful safeguard against fraud. But some counties that have
already installed printerless, computerized voting systems oppose any
requirement that they add new equipment to provide paper receipts of any
kind.
Other proposals for providing paper receipts in computerized voting
systems include attaching printers to voting machines that spit out a hard
copy of votes recorded below a glass barrier. Once voters reviewed the
receipts and confirmed that they were accurate, the receipts would be
placed in a secure box. If a recount were required, voting officials would
open the boxes and proceed to tally up the results by hand.
Critics of this type of receipt argue that the end product is little
better than a punch card ballot, subject to many of the same kinds of
miscount problems that plagued the Florida election in 2000. Encrypted
systems like Chaum's, on the other hand, would not be vulnerable to many of
those flaws, because only the records that were tampered with would be
subject to verification in a recount. In addition, tampering could be
detected the moment a voter left the polling station.
Chaum, who declines to give his age for privacy reasons, boasts a dazzling
resume as one of the brightest computer scientists of the 1980s, whose
ideas led to the creation of anonymous remailers, privacy-protecting Web
browsing techniques and secure electronic cash. He returned to the topic of
secure voting four years ago and came up with his crucial
innovation--encrypted receipts on plain paper--in late 2003. Chaum owns
patents covering the use
