Re: Dual DRE/paper system

[Neal McBurnett <neal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Dec 24, 2003 at 10:00:58PM -0700, Nicholas Bernstein wrote:
> Neal McBurnett wrote:
> >This ends up allowing the user to prove who and what they voted for.
> This does no worse in this regard than absentee voting.
> 
> David Chaum's idea is clever, but it does seem unnecessarily 
> complicated. We already have a absentee system that could be used to in 
> vote buying. In any case, if people really want to prove how they voted, 
> they can take a camcorder with them into the both. Even my digital still 
> camera can take 3 minutes of video, certainly long enough for me to 
> demonstrate how I voted.

It would be a foolish person who accepted a video or photocopy as
proof of how you voted.  It would be easy to change your real vote
after recording this sort of evidence, or to doctor the evidence.  But
your scheme provides posession of a "Unique Ballot ID" number and a
way to verify how that vote was officially cast after leaving the
polls.

> Incidently, I don't believe there is a danger of it getting patented. 
> Once an idea is in the public domain it can no longer be patented.

Chaum told me he had already filed a number of patents in this area.
Of course we won't know for quite a while what claims (if any) are
granted, and where.  This will tend to complicate and slow down the
deployment of systems based on the idea, unfortunately, at a time when
the laws are stipulating deadlines.

Neal McBurnett                 http://bcn.boulder.co.us/~neal/
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