[David Chaum is a remarkable fellow who pioneered digital cash. He's recently been working on secure voting projects. See www.chaum.com and Steven Levy's _Crypto_ book. --Declan] --- Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 15:36:24 -0800 To: Declan McCullagh <declanat_private> From: David Chaum <davidat_private> Subject: Breakthrough allows first receipts from voting booths! FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Breakthrough allows receipts from voting booths: First-ever legal receipts are surprisingly powerful -- and may be just in time! Los Angles, CA - Receipts showing exactly who you voted for, just what people want and expect these days, are generally outlawed to protect against vote selling and other abuses; a scientist has, however, come up with the first receipt that cannot be used for any such abuse and yet can ensure that your vote is actually included in the final tally. The new type of receipt, which can be printed by a modified version of familiar receipt printers, contains your vote -- but in a coded form. You can read it clearly in the booth, when it is still printed on two layers. When the layers are separated, either one you choose to take has the vote information you saw coded in it, but it cannot be read (except by computers run by election officials). When the votes have to be added up for the final tally, the actual receipts posted on an official public website are the input to the process. The results of the process are then subject to a public audit. A lotto-like draw selects which items must be decrypted, but never enough to compromise privacy. Anyone with a pc can then check all the decryptions published on the website and thereby verify that the final tally must be correct. The audit is so strong that it cannot be fooled by breaking any code or malicious software running on voting machines. The cryptographer, Dr. David Chaum, known for inventing eCash and his pioneering company DigiCash, who came up with the receipt system said "The more you look into how elections are actually run, even in this country, the clearer the gap becomes between the way it is done and what we could and really should be doing". Chaum also said "Today's trusted black-box mentality has led to very high costs, meaning computerized voting mainly for rich counties, an utter lack of real control and no way to re-deploy the hardware for schools and libraries." At a time when the House has passed the first ever federal subsidy, at $2.65b, and a similar bill is on the Senate floor with a $3.5b price tag, one has to wonder: Will receipts and other new solutions have a chance, or will the subsides backfire and put currently-certified computerized systems in place on such a scale that major change will be a very long way off? There is a complex interlocking of state and federal laws, agencies, and quasi-governmental bodies that has erected a set of design specifications and time-consuming steps that only new systems must navigate, first at the federal level and then for most states separately. "When this was all first set up more than a decade ago" Chaum quipped, "the rationale was to keep unscrupulous vendors out, now it may just keep innovation out." Contact: David Chaum, SureVote: (818) 512-1024 (cellular/voicemail) davidat_private Jim Dolbear, Larkin Associates: (310) 621-3580 (cellular/voicemail) jimat_private ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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