NYCPHP Meetup

[Steve Manes]

Ajai Khattri wrote:
> I think a lot of prominent geeks already said the machines were not secure 
> without some kind of hardcopy audit trail. But this government has a habit 
> of ignoring experts in anything (e.g. can you say "DMCA"? ).

I'm on a political list with a bunch of technogeeks.  After the 2004 
election, we developed an idea for a hybrid compromise of computer + 
paper trail.

Your vote is recorded electronically with a UUID on a paper punched 
receipt.  The voter can see who he just voted for.  He then passes 1-n 
read-only stations on his way out where his vote is read, recorded and 
archived redundantly by each of the political parties and by any 
watchdog groups like LOWV.  Each station would be built by a different 
manufacturer.  It displays the vote to the voter where he confirms it. 
If all detectors agree on the vote, it's locked in.  If the vote is 
invalidated by any of them then the voter casts a standard paper ballot 
for hand counting.  Otherwise, he drops his receipt in a box on the way 
out.  At the end of the day, the data from all machines is read and 
compared for accuracy.  If there are any discrepancies, the ID-encoded 
receipt is retrieved for manual counting.

Or something like that.