Victory in Winston-Salem

Optical voting machines that scan paper ballots can be programmed to cheat.

Anywhere you have an electronic device, and anywhere you have a connection between electronic devices, you are at the mercy of the high-tech fraudster.

In turn, this means, you are at the mercy of election administrators, since they have pervasive access to the chips and devices.

BlackBoxVoting should contribute more to educating the public how we can actually achieve control over election administrators, and these chips, rather than naively throwing it back to paper ballots.

Paper ballots gets you some very important checks, but it doesn't prevent deliberate frauds by election administrators. It is my believe that an architecture based on cryptography will eventually achieve the reliability we need (If people like BBV would contribute your efforts to help)

Kind regards,
Todd -- in Kirkland (a fan of votehere and such things.)

Mandatory code review! Good work David, that's a huge accomplishment just getting that in front of the board and the general public. I apologize for using the word "naive". As children we sensed that it was pejorative, years before we understood that its true meaning is unawareness. I stand by my opinion that much of BBVs work has been unaware of some things. Certainly we are all unaware of many things.

The general public is most critically unaware of the math of cryptography, and the basic principles of logic circuits (gates, flip flops, registers etc.) Once you realize that vote counts can be nailed down with digital signatures, your attention focuses on the microcode in the devices, the program code, and on chain of custody of the masks, chips, and equipment, from manufacture through the end of voting cycles.

Government bureaucracies will remain technically incapable of these tasks, for the long term, as well as lacking the passion and determination and funding that will always exist among the bad guys.

We need a council of wise and determined citizens to guide this process-- which MUST be corrected, yet, without expecting impossible things from the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people involved in elections.

In my opinion, the answer involves decentralizing the technical infrastructure to a point that it cannot be captured by any single points of contol. For example if you put the digital signing capability in the hands of citizens, in hardened signing devices. Give them handheld, digital signing devices, instead of voter registration cards. These devices would use the chips already available from Dallas Semi and all the GSM cellphones and these things are fairly ubiquitous in banking and finance, there's even a signing chip in the AmexBlue card, iirc, although Amex controls your signing key not the customer. Our need is different. We want to deliberately put the private keys in areas of silicon not possible to steal. Thus, the bad guy would have to crack 200 million voters devices.

The signed votes be kept available to be decrypted and verified by anybody who wanted to confirm their vote was received and counted properly.

Todd