Category Archives: vocomp

Aleks Essex of Punchscan, prodded by one of my comments, posted his thoughts about raising the profile of end-to-end verifiable systems in the public eye:

The allaboutvoting suggestion was to establish an outreach to the broader public about E2E. Of course this is a good idea, and something that’s overdue. But that’s going to be tough. As for Punchscan, our approach to raising its profile has always been by “doing.” First we designed and built it. Then we debuted it in a binding election. Then we won an international competition. I think that these milestones were all necessary; people need things they can “touch.” Pictures and movie of real voters using Punchscan I think helped “make it real” to people, because it was real. Winning the ten thousand dollars sure got people interested. So I’d say it’s these “press” moments that will see E2E find its way into “normal” conversation, if only for a moment.

My prodding comment was:

Unfortunately much of the talk about E2E is pretty off.
I’ve seen:
* “there is no problem”
* “your solution is something only geeks can understand”
* “your solution is to just ‘trust us’”
* hijacking of E2E potential as a call to inaction with respect to the use voting machines without any verification
* lots of heavily technical bureaucratic jargon that I don’t quite follow yet

Does the E2EV movement have any umbrella outreach and discussion place? My perception of it right now is that it is gaining momentum academically but that there is little advocacy intended for a general audience. What little there is seems to be partitioned into individual E2E projects (like punchscan) rather than movement wide.

An active yahoo group might be a helpful start.

I’m thinking of just starting an E2EV yahoo group myself but I’m not yet sufficiently committed to research and invite all the people needed to jump start a community.

Punchscan was the winning system in the 2006 2007 VoComp competition.

In their own words:

Punchscan is a voting system invented by David Chaum that allows voters to take a piece of the ballot home with them as a receipt. This receipt does not allow voters to prove how they voted to others, but it does permit them to:

• Verify that they have properly indicated their votes to election officials (cast-as-intended).
• Verify with extremely high assurance that all votes were counted properly (counted-as-cast).

It uses simple cryptographic techniques to ensure election integrity. The demos on their ‘learn more’ page shows how a voter casts and verifies their vote as well as showing how election integrity can be audited.

After you go through the demos you should also review the excellent FAQ.

The system that is demonstrated can only handle ballots for which there are two candidates for each race. I believe that they have extensions to the system to handle multiple candidates and well as handling

• alternate voting systems
• improved support for disabled voters
• write-in candidates

So it ready for prime-time use?
I don’t know. It has only been used for a few elections and is a very new system so I suspect that it is not ready for wide deployment.

If you are interested in following the development and deployment of punchscan you can join their mailing list.