One word that all posts above forget:

One word that all posts above forget:

Posted Aug 9, 2007 15:38 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (subscriber, #755)
In reply to: One word that all posts above forget: by hummassa
Parent article: Securing our votes

One other observation: if the ballots are numbered sequentially, and you log the random starting number -- or print "FIRST BALLOT" on it -- then you can audit that a stack is complete, and extra-counting organizations, as you mention in your other posting, can tell they have all the ballots.

And it should be cheap enough to build counting boxes that lots of different people can do it commercially, and such orgs can all buy them from different people, or even build them themselves, and if the paper handling is good enough, then the ballots will *survive* 50 counts.

Hell, the election officials themselves could buy counting machines from different manufacturers and run each election through twice and compare.

And *none of the equipment is on the security critical path* in this approach, in case anyone missed that.

You *can* have preliminary counts come out of the terminals themselves, but there's no sense in hacking those, because the system procedures make it worthless to change them -- the dual count of voter-approved paper will show any mistakes.

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