Maryland experimented with a new voting system last week

[thewayne]

Rather interesting. First, each ballot is numbered (they are already so they can account for spoiled ballots). Second, you use a special pen to mark your candidate. When you mark your candidate, a hidden code is revealed, and you can go online and enter your ballot number and verify that your vote was properly counted for the selections that you made.

It's also inexpensive, using high-end commercial scanners, coming in at half the cost of dedicated systems.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/11/scantegrity

Comments

[deborak]

So if you want to know how a specific person voted, all you need is a keyboard capture trojan on their computer so you can snag their ballot number and secret code when they go online to verify . . . heh

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

If your computer is compromised by a keylogger, you have more problems than that to worry about!

I don't know if it's still used, but there used to be a trick used to see if someone read the spam that you sent out. You embedded a 1 pixel by 1 pixel invisible gif/jpeg in the email that was linked to a web site, the file name would contain a serial number that was linked to the address the message was sent to, so if you read the message, the gif would load from the web site and they would know it was an active email account that the message was sent to.

A number of email programs then came out with the option to block all image loads.

Overall, I think it's a good thing because in most current systems, you have to take it on faith that your ballot was correctly tallied as you voted it.

[silveradept]

This looks like a good foray into ensuring that votes are accurately recorded and counted. This system will be quietly killed because of it by Diebold or others who have a stake in ensuring elections are closed-source.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Diebold sold off their election systems to a competitor and is no longer in the biz, but that doesn't mean that someone else couldn't be similarly inclined.

[silveradept]

Considering how many people there are that want the ability to buy the vote counters if they feel they're not going to win the normal way, there are going to be lots of people who think closed-source secret code machines are definitely in order.