Scratch-and-Vote System Could Help Eliminate Election Fraud

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A new lottery-style scratch card has been developed that might make elections less susceptible to rigging.
By Duncan Graham-Rowe

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

In future elections cryptography could allow voters to check that their “X” is associated with the candidate they voted for (Credit: istockphoto.com/Panaroid)

Compared with modern touch-screen voting systems, it may seem low tech. But according to its creators, the scratch-and-vote (S&V) system is a good way to let voters check that their ballot papers have been counted as they intended.

Using a current touch-screen system, "there is no way for an individual voter to know that his or her vote has been properly counted," says Josh Benaloh, a cryptographer who pioneered the development of cryptography in elections, and who now works for Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. "Even election officials cannot be certain that the systems are free of errors."

Some of these machines are now designed to print paper receipts for each vote that's cast. This procedure is a little better, says Benaloh; but voters are still dependent on other people and procedures. "In practice, voters have no way to ensure that their votes are being counted properly or that they are being counted at all," he says.

With encryption-based voting systems, end-to-end verifiability is possible, because any voter should be able to "audit" the entire voting process. At the same time, such auditing processes must be balanced against the need for anonymity, says Ben Adida at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Adida created the S&V system with Ronald Rivest, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, who co-created RSA, one of the most widely used encryption algorithms.