Cryptographic voting system developed by MIT prof has first real world trial

While the description ("MIT prof") is factually correct, that's like describing Donald Knuth as a "Stanford prof". Both place the focus on the affiliation, whereas (at least with this crowd) the identity of the professor is more interesting and eye-catching.

o Physical Tokens - Something people can see and touch. Something that human beings can physically recount if they have to and will (at random) to confirm that the automated system has not been compromised.

o Cryptographic Verification - I can check after the fact to determine if my vote was counted. Supposedly only 2% of the population needs to check to determine if there was a compromise.

o Simple Counting system - The computer code required to count how many votes were cast for each party should be relatively straight forward and easy to verify.

After thinking about this for a while I'm not sure what happens with the False Positives - what if I write my number down incorrectly and can't find it after voting. I suspect that a certain number (0.5%?) will do so and now be convinced that there was fraud with the new system. Possible downside. Of course, the electoral commissioner will be able to take this into account - Let's say we have 100 Million people voting, and that 4% of those check their votes, and that 0.5 % of the people who checked their votes wrote the number down incorrectly, and 10% of those people report it to the electoral commissioner, there should be about 2,000 reports, on average, of Fraud.

Now - what about DELIBERATE false positive - an attack on this system is now to have the losing party overwhelm the electoral commissioner with reports of fraud.

The great thing about a system with Physical Tokens (Paper) is you can have scrutineers from both parties, in the presence of independent observers, _physically watch people count tokens and challenge_

Physical Ballot Box stuffing in a first world country is next to impossible, as long as you have strong representation from the population during the casting of votes and counting.

I hate the idea of purely electronic voting for things where the incentive to cheat is huge, and the recourse for the ordinary citizen to help ensure that the count is fair is absent.

Let's hope that this system (or something like it) takes off.

Here are two rules I discovered about voting that are quite non-obvious:

You can not print out a receipt of the votes, in order. Because in a small town, someone could write down the order that people show up, and then correlate it with the order of votes on the receipt. (This is why paper trails of electronic votes were never implemented.)

The voter must never be given a receipt that allows a third party to verify who they voted for. This is because it allows vote buying: I buy votes, and you show me your receipt and prove you voted for who I want before getting paid.

This system fails the second rule, and thus will never be implemented widely.

There needs to be a way to verify whether a person has not voted. Could be based on SSN in some way. But it also has to be simple to use.

Oh, oh why someone like Ron Rivest allows himself to be associated with a name like "Scantegrity". It's a name I could expect to see in the title of the next Doghouse on Bruce Scheier's blog. And it almost reads like Scam-tegrity. D'uh.

To offset the above, there's a nice summary of the system on Wikipedia as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity.

The problem is not people "hacking" elections. Actual instances of voter fraud or attemted voter fraud are extremely rare in this country.

The problem is the perception of fraud. And this system is WAY too complicated for anyone to understand. Sure, it's great and I hope it gets adopted all over, but actual security at the polls was never really the issue.

If I take home a ballot serial number, a vote-buyer would be able to look up my ballot later and confirm my vote.

But as I understand it, vote buying barely registers as a source of fraud -- it's stuffing voter registration lists, keeping voters from going to the polls and stuffing blank ballots.