[E-voting] Minimum requirement to juge voting "technology"

[Fergal Daly]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2004 at 02:03:56PM +0100, Michael McMahon wrote:
> Fergal Daly wrote:
> >It's just unfortunate that a secure e-voting system which doesn't keep 
> >paper
> >copies of the ballots is a theoretical impossibility (or have I've just
> >misunderstood the last year of campaigning? :-)
> 
> It's certainly not a "theoretical impossibility", though I would agree that
> a lot of people have difficulty accepting it (I'm talking about Chaums 
> system).

If you don't keep a paper copy of the ballot then you can only detect but
not correct the result of electronic failure or tampering. This means that
tampering would result in reruns of parts of the election which in turn
leads to some groups getting to vote with some extra knowledge of how the
election is going - which is exactly the problem being discussed in this
thread.

So Chaum's system is secure in the sense that it detects tampering but
voting requires a higher level of security.

Chaum's system is clever and does solve a real problem. Is there any reason
not to combine VVAT and Chaum?

F