<story><title>Install PAC-MAN on Sequoia voting machine w/o breaking tamper-evident seals</title><url>http://www.cse.umich.edu/~jhalderm/pacman/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>seldo</author><text>It is one of the curious facts of modern culture that the people who love technology the most also seem to be the most opposed to electronic voting.&lt;p&gt;I think it&apos;s because the people who most understand how computers work also understand that no data can be considered trustworthy if somebody else has been in possession of the hardware. Yet governments continue to trust the impossible promises of the people who make voting machines that their machines are secure, despite a continuous stream of demonstrations to the contrary, both intentional and accidental.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dandelany</author><text>I don&apos;t know that we&apos;re opposed to it in theory, it&apos;s just that every single implementation thus far has been terrifically bad. Making the code open source would go a long way, I think, as would establishing open working groups to establish security standards. I may be an optimist, but I do believe that theoretically (at least information-theoretically[1]), it can be done well.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Information-theoretically+secure+voting&amp;#38;hl=en&amp;#38;as_sdt=0&amp;#38;as_vis=1&amp;#38;oi=scholart&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Information-theoreticall...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Install PAC-MAN on Sequoia voting machine w/o breaking tamper-evident seals</title><url>http://www.cse.umich.edu/~jhalderm/pacman/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>seldo</author><text>It is one of the curious facts of modern culture that the people who love technology the most also seem to be the most opposed to electronic voting.&lt;p&gt;I think it&apos;s because the people who most understand how computers work also understand that no data can be considered trustworthy if somebody else has been in possession of the hardware. Yet governments continue to trust the impossible promises of the people who make voting machines that their machines are secure, despite a continuous stream of demonstrations to the contrary, both intentional and accidental.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jasonjei</author><text>I think the issue is the difficulty of auditing electronic votes.  Computers and databases have made it so easy to forge data--just look at Bernie Madoff.&lt;p&gt;The best way to ameliorate these discomforts is to ensure that a list of eligible voters is made available every year (already available under the current system), as well as a list and sum total of those eligible that voted. We would need to assign every voter a UUID every time he votes, and provide the voter a printed receipt of the UUID and selected choices (if desired) on security paper (controlled stock of security paper with its own unique identifier to be accounted for), and publish all election results with the selected choices matched to a UUID on a website every year in CSV and HTML formats.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m sure there will always be ways to tamper the system. The key is that if every one is able to watch the system (like open source code auditing), the risk of discrepancies or error is minimized. The UUID will allow the voter to confirm that his choices match the recorded results.&lt;p&gt;If this system were implemented, it would be better than the status quo. The current system may seem better, but it&apos;s prone to human error (Scantrons not being scanned by an optical reader; hanging chads; etc).</text></comment>