FC: David Chaum's new project: Voting booths with secure receipts

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[David Chaum is a remarkable fellow who pioneered digital cash. He's 
recently been working on secure voting projects. See www.chaum.com and 
Steven Levy's _Crypto_ book. --Declan]

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Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2002 15:36:24 -0800
To: Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>
From: David Chaum <david () surevote com>
Subject: Breakthrough allows first receipts from voting booths!

FOR IMMEDIATE  RELEASE
Breakthrough allows receipts from voting booths:
First-ever legal receipts are surprisingly powerful
-- and may be just in time!

Los Angles, CA - Receipts showing exactly who you voted for, just what 
people want and expect these days, are generally outlawed to protect 
against vote selling and other abuses; a scientist has, however, come up 
with the first receipt that cannot be used for any such abuse and yet can 
ensure that your vote is actually included in the final tally.
   The new type of receipt, which can be printed by a modified version of 
familiar receipt printers, contains your vote -- but in a coded form. You 
can read it clearly in the booth, when it is still printed on two layers. 
When the layers are separated, either one you choose to take has the vote 
information you saw coded in it, but it cannot be read (except by computers 
run by election officials).
   When the votes have to be added up for the final tally, the actual 
receipts posted on an official public website are the input to the process. 
The results of the process are then subject to a public audit. A lotto-like 
draw selects which items must be decrypted, but never enough to compromise 
privacy. Anyone with a pc can then check all the decryptions published on 
the website and thereby verify that the final tally must be correct. The 
audit is so strong that it cannot be fooled by breaking any code or 
malicious software running on voting machines.
   The cryptographer, Dr. David Chaum, known for inventing eCash and his 
pioneering company DigiCash, who came up with the receipt system said "The 
more you look into how elections are actually run, even in this country, 
the clearer the gap becomes between the way it is done and what we could 
and really should be doing". Chaum also said "Today's trusted black-box 
mentality has led to very high costs, meaning computerized voting mainly 
for rich counties, an utter lack of real control and no way to re-deploy 
the hardware for schools and libraries."
   At a time when the House has passed the first ever federal subsidy, at 
$2.65b, and a similar bill is on the Senate floor with a $3.5b price tag, 
one has to wonder: Will receipts and other new solutions have a chance, or 
will the subsides backfire and put currently-certified computerized systems 
in place on such a scale that major change will be a very long way off? 
There is a complex interlocking of state and federal laws, agencies, and 
quasi-governmental bodies that has erected a set of design specifications 
and time-consuming steps that only new systems must navigate, first at the 
federal level and then for most states separately. "When this was all first 
set up more than a decade ago" Chaum quipped, "the rationale was to keep 
unscrupulous vendors out, now it may just keep innovation out."

Contact: David Chaum, SureVote:
(818) 512-1024 (cellular/voicemail) david () survote com
Jim Dolbear, Larkin Associates:
(310) 621-3580 (cellular/voicemail) jim () larkin com 




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