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."

How can reciepts ever work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Take home receipts are vulnerable to exploits that make them seem useless. Any random voter could go home and make a fake receipt to claim the results were tampered with. Sure, you could combat that by keeping record of which ballots, with their identifying numbers, were passed out, but if you're going to tamper with the election results, you could delete the vote from the count and the list, then when the voter complains their vote wasn't counted you could claim they faked their ballot...

public key techonology

[FunkyELF]

I think it was a comment here that once suggested a voting system where users could ensure that their vote counted.
Every registered voter has a public / private key.
Votes are digitally signed by the voters.
Then after the election (or during), the signed messages are posted online.
Voters would be able to see that their vote counted in the right direction, and unless someone else knows your private key, nobody would be able to tell who you voted for.

The non-digital analog to this went something like this. Think of it like a system where you write down who you vote for on the top of a piece of paper. Then you tear off the top and place it in a sealed box. The bottom half is your receipt. After the election, you can compare your bottom half to every top half out there until you find the one that matches the tear pattern.

Re:The only problem I see with this

[techno-vampire]

They were already using that in Shakespeare's time: "The Cat, the Rat and Lovel the Dog, rule all England under the Hog."