Punchscan Wins Open Source Voting Competition

An anonymous reader writes "Punchscan emerged victorious at the open source university voting systems competition, VoComp. For their efforts, they will receive the US$10,000 prize provided by ES&S (which has recently been named in a scandal in Florida). The second-place team put up a good fight: 'Per Ron Rivest, one of the contest's judges, the runner-up team, the Pret-a-Voter team from the University of Surrey in the UK, gave Punchscan a tough run for the first-place money until the Punchscan team dug through Pret-a-Voter's source code and found a significant security flaw in their random number generation. Oops.' It will be interesting to see if these systems ever make it into the mainstream. Kudos to ES&S for showing their forward thinking in this area, as the other voting machine vendors, such as Diebold, did not support the competition."

Re:How can reciepts ever work?

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

"Any random voter could go home and make a fake receipt to claim the results were tampered with."

TFA explains how that would be pointless, since the pairing of letters with names is different on each form. The receipt doesn't tell you anything about who you voted for, only what letters you chose. And if their point was to try to change an election, they would need a large group of people to be in on it to guarantee their desired outcome, and the larger the group, the more likely their fraud would be to be exposed.

Oversight

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

It's called oversight. Punchscan makes it easy for every single voter to ensure that the items they marked are exactly what was entered into the database. People can even download large randomly-selected chunks of the database to help ensure integrity. Read Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] for more of the security features.

Re:Color me unimpressed

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if you had read about punchscan at all you would know that it specifically does not allow vote verification. The voter takes a receipt home with them yes, but when they go to verify that their vote has been counted they see the scanned image of the receipt they hold in their hands. These two identitical halves cannot be used to show how one voted, only that their vote was received as expected.