Comments on: Global lessons in e-voting

special coverage India reports success, while Venezuela fears fraud. What can the United States learn?

[tharcod]

Paper trail/Auditability

e-Voting machines should have a simple inexpensive ink jet (or similar) technology printer attached to them. Most of these are just PC's in a different form factor (just as most ATM machines are), so it should be easy to add a USB or parallel port.

Simply print two postcards, both identical. Each card has a cryptographically-unique identifier at the top of it recorded at the time of vote, the votes in human readable form, and a block of barcode (machine readable).

The voter retains one postcard for their records, the other postcard is retained for public records. A separate system can be used to read the post cards in the event of a recount.

It's that easy -- if the voters disagree with an official recount, they still have their card showing how they voted. These could be audited by a third party still -- separate from the official recount.

[VWfeature]

you need a secret, verifiable ballot

The problem with putting how you voted on a receipt is, you no longer have a secret ballot. Someone can buy your vote, and know you delivered for their candidate. It does have its appeal though. One could outlaw the practice of buying votes, then have lots of sting operations, more than the number of real vote buying. Might work.

If it were a choice between secret ballots and secure, verifiable ballots (which it isn't) I'd go for secure, verifiable, myself.

Venezuelan fraud

Hi there, I'm a IT consultant and a long time readed of news.com. Anyway, I just read the article about the elections in my country and I'd like to add something to it. You don't know how terrible venezuelan opossition is -I hate both sides but somehow oposition is a lot worse- and they came up with this "fraud" right after the veredict. Let me tell you that it's been over a month since that and there have been no proof of fraud, everything has been said and nothing has been demostrated. I am not denying fraud, it's just that there are no clues at least of fraud

Juan Hernandez

Fraud in Venezuela e-voting

Dear Mr. Hernandez, I completely disagree with you! It is not necessary to be an IT consultant to realize that INDEED there was fraud! One remarkable aspect of the fraud is the negativity of the CNE (National Electoral Council) to allow a complete and ?clean? audit process to the machines used. They did audit ?some? machines but, this was done in a closed-door environment, not even allowing the opposition to be present during the process (an randomly select different machines). There are obvious reason to be believe that president Hugo Chavez has done EVERYTHING to stay in power, even giving Venezuelan citizenship ?by millions? to Cubans and Colombians among others. I feel embarrassed to freely say this to the world but, this is the reality. There was fraud! And as we say in Venezuela: No se puede tapar el sol con un dedo; you can?t hide the sun with just one finger. Thank you, José Gómez

"fraud"

Mr Gomez, don't get me wrong -pana no soy chavista-, I think that there may have been fraud but tell me this, following the detailed results in http://cne.gov.ve/resultados/, how come there are no voting center representatives -miembros de mesa- denying anything in there? -that's why I don't think there has been any fraud- believe me, with our media being so "yellowish" that would be the first thing on screen. In my voting center, "Si" won by 70% but if you look closer, you'll see that most "No" supporters come from poor neighborhoods.

BTW, I expected insults from fanatics after I wrote that but your response was quite clever... thanks for that

Juan

[Nigel Johnstone]

Easter Eggs in voting machines?

I wonder if there are easter eggs in voting machines? For example tap 3 times in the top right corner then once in the bottom left to change the vote to be the democrat, or 4 times in the bottom right corner + 1 in the top left for republican.

You then get your supporters to do this on the machines they use to vote. Machines used for testing wouldn't be affected because nobody would be activating the easter egg on them.

It seems kindof easy to rig an election with these machines.

[msmulgi]

good