Electronic voting: Moving beyond the ballot box

VoteHere's take on encryption
Chaum isn't the only contender seeking to bring encryption to the voting verification process. A similar cryptographic system was invented by Neff, who holds a doctorate in theoretical mathematics from Princeton University and is now the chief scientist at VoteHere. Neff's invention also draws from mathematics but does not require a viewfinder that combines two receipts into a human-readable ballot.

Instead, VoteHere's patented system prints personalised, encrypted receipts for each voter. A vote for president could be represented as "DGA1", and governor as "3QLK". After the election, voters can confirm that their vote was counted by checking the county Web site to make sure the encrypted sequence corresponds to what's posted. Or, if they choose, they can hand their receipt to a trusted organisation like the League of Women Voters and ask them to do the verification.

"It's conceptually easy," Neff said during an interview at the conference sponsored by Rutgers University's theoretical computer science centre. "But it has to be plugged into the process that [voting machine] vendors use."

Concocting arcane mathematical formulae is almost trivial, compared with the arduous process of convincing vendors and state election officials to adopt verifiable, encrypted systems. Neither group is known as an aggressive early adopter of new technologies.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake. US state governments are racing to install electronic voting machines as a result of the federal Help America Vote Act, which was enacted after the 2000 election and gives states hefty federal grants if they meet certain deadlines.

One key date: any state accepting those grants must replace all its punch card and lever machines by 2 November, 2004. Because of that looming deadline, many states have already bought replacements for their oldest systems and are reluctant to write a second set of checks to add encrypted receipt technology. In addition, Chaum's system won't be in production until after the November election.

Neff expresses frustration at the difficulty of convincing voting vendors such as Diebold Election Systems to license VoteHere's technology and produce encrypted receipts. "They're just not technically savvy," Neff says. "They've got incredibly limited technical abilities, and they're desperately clinging to the hope that all this [concern about e-voting] will blow over. They want to sing the praises of the little box they plop on someone's table and not worry about it. The other conjecture is that somewhere, they appreciate the fact that, moving toward the future, the verification technology follows what Microsoft did to hardware in the early days. It becomes more important than the box."

So far, Neff's VoteHere company has signed a deal with Sequoia Voting Systems to license its encrypted receipt technology, though it's nonexclusive. Unlike Chaum's system that requires a special viewfinder, any electronic voting machine equipped with a printer can produce the receipts. State election officials aren't exactly biting, but Neff says "it looks very realistic that we can do a pilot in California or Maryland for the November election."

Diebold has attracted the most criticism of any e-voting machine maker. In April, the California Secretary of State took the drastic step of banning Diebold-made systems from being used in some counties. Last November, California began investigating allegations of illegal vote tampering with Diebold machines. An earlier blow came in June 2003, when university researchers concluded that a voter could cast unlimited ballots without detection.

Neff of VoteHere acknowledged that encrypted ballots aren't a complete solution for all voting problems. For instance, election officials must be trusted to prevent people from voting twice under different names or at multiple voting locations. "We've addressed 80 percent of the threats and 100 percent of the really bad threats," Neff says. "We can't [seem to] get beyond that remaining 20 percent."

But sceptic Mercuri argues that even that number is optimistic. "I don't agree you've addressed 80 percent of the threats," she says. "It depends on your threat model."