"Trei, Peter" wrote: > Ballot boxes are also subject to many forms of fraud. But a dual > system (electronic backed up by paper) is more resistant to > attack then either alone.
The dual, and multiple, system can be done without paper ballot. There is nothing "magic" about paper as a record medium.
I think one benefit of using paper ballots as the backup is that there are already pretty well-understood ways to deal with paper ballots. I like the idea of the election observers having at least one piece of the technology they really understand.
I can send a link for a paper on this that was presented at the Tomales Bay conference on voting systems last year, using Shannon's Tenth Theorem as the theoretical background, introducing the idea of multiple "witnesses". If two witnesses are not 100% mutually dependent, the probability that both witnesses may fail at the same time is smaller than that of any single witness to fail.
Is the relevant question here about probabilistic failures, or about conspiracies? Clearly, the size and cost of the conspiracy gets much bigger if there's a check value on the election results that is handled completely outside the voting machine.
Cheers, Ed Gerck
--John Kelsey, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
