Thursday, November 29, 2007

E-voting

The great idea of E-voting is spoiled by corrupt and/or incompetent politicians, as article and its predecessors document. I can understand that the voting system (purely paper ballot, hand counting) can be problematic in country where a significant share of population does not speak English and some 200m people might come to the elections. So the proposed solution is the "paper trail", when the machine taking your electronic vote will print on a trail of paper your choice. This is obviously absurd, because you can get to know who voted for whom simply by knowing the order of people.
Ok, so lets fix it. The E-machine has to print something, but it should not be in fixed order. So what about e-machine printing your ballot on a paper. You will take this paper, check whether it looks ok (is there a name of the guy you wanted to vote for?) and put it into the box (the same we put paper ballots now). This combines the advantages of e-voting (immediate results, easy voting) with verifiability of the "correctness" of the results - you can randomly select machines for "recount". This itself can be very fast, because paper have nothing written on them, everything is printed, so OCR can achieve VERY high precision.
This clearly cannot be path-breaking idea. So why I have never read about it?

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