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["Michael D. Thomas" <mdthomas AT mindspring.com>]

> >Oh, but yes Ed -- a secure solution is possible....
> I'm told that "all" systems have problems: Paper ballot, lever,
optical
> scan, punch card (which we've heard about), all have been accuracy-
> challenged!

I agree. Trustworthiness of voting systems doesn't scale well. Here's an
example of a completely trustworthy system that wouldn't scale beyond a
few dozen voters:

- Each voter is authenticated properly. That's an entirely different
discussion....
- Each vote is signed in such a manner that only the voter can relate
their own vote to themselves and no one else can correlate another voter
with their vote.
- Each person that votes counts all the votes.
- As part of the count, each person confirms that their vote was
present.
- If the counts don't match, everyone recounts.
- If someone doesn't find their vote, everyone re-votes with new "vote
signatures."
- (The "vote signature" part could be omitted if everyone agrees that
there is no way that a vote that has already been cast could be tampered
with.)

Such a system would be very trustworthy, but very inconvenient and
cumbersome. Maybe you can come up with a completely trustworthy system
that scales to millions of voters. I can't.

Large scale anonymous voting requires trust in the process, system and
administration. Open source systems that are highly transparent
certainly help. I'll go so far as to say that compiled languages (C,
Java, C#) should /not/ be used for voting systems because of the
separation between machine language and humanly readable language.
Voting systems should be transparent to the degree that a novice
programmer can understand exactly what the system is doing at any
particular point in time. Maybe the lines of code that are executing
should be displayed to the voters as the system is processing their
vote.

But even such extreme transparency cannot give us complete
trustworthiness. Even open source systems aren't open to those that
don't know the programming languages involved. All systems can be
undermined by improper implementation and malicious use. A perfectly
trustworthy and scalable voting system is an impossible goal that open
source systems can approach, but never achieve.