Via Financial Times:
Scientists in Britain and Luxembourg are developing an electronic voting system that could plug security loopholes and curb the potential for electoral fraud.The encrypted Pret-A-Voter (PaV) prototype will be easy to use, cheap to run and “more secure than anything available at the moment”, said James Heather of the University of Surrey, one of the specialists working on the project.Mr Heather said it could be implemented anywhere in the world. “If recent elections in Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Russia and Iran had used our system, there would have been no potential for fraud,” he told an audience at the British Science Festival in Guildford on Thursday.Under PaV, a vote is cast on an encrypted sheet of paper in a polling station. After voters tick off their preferences they divide the perforated voting sheet in half.
The left hand strip, which lists the candidates’ names in random order – which differs on each ballot – is discarded.
The right hand strip, which contains the voting marks, is read electronically and the votes registered on computer. The paper is also used as a receipt, so that voters can track their ballot online. Since the voting information is encrypted, it can only be interpreted by specialist electoral staff.
The software-independent technology guarantees the accuracy of the count and helps to remove bias that can occur under coercion.
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