Paul Venezia, of infoworld.com, on the 18th of May 2009, published Toward a Technology Bill of Rights, that cites six potential elements of a Technology Bill of Rights.

Article no. 5 reads:
Any software or hardware used to conduct laws and public policy shall be open-source.

This is especially important for elections, to avoid possible frauds, like the now infamous Diebold machines from the US Elections. (closed-source and errorprone).

How can we secure our democratic trust in voting machines, when there is no papertrail, like with regular voting systems? At the same time, we have to keep voting secret.

Binary papertrails

Recount of a election-result, is a straight forward process today. The papervotes are there, so it’s just a matter of (hard) work to reassure the public that the results are correct. The same checks has to be possible in a way, so the public can trust voting machines.

What if every voter gets a paper-receipt from their vote with a sequence of random digits or letters, then they have something to check against? This paper-receipt would let them check that their vote was correct, later, ie. on a government webpage. They would type their random number and get a response telling them what party or candidate their vote went to. This way there is a check against possible fraud, and the user still maintains their anonymity, except for the IP-address. It’s not perfect but maybe a start? The server for this check must of course not log any IP-addresses.

When should electronic voting machines replace paper votes?

No sooner than computer literacy is as high as literacy. In countries where literacy is close to 100%, there are no practical problems with paper elections. All voters will know how to read and write, and therefore be able to add or strike-out candidates, and therefore vote correctly. The same must be true for electronic voting. When close to 100% of the public is comfortable with computers or the same form of input used on electronic voting machines, and we have a system in place to avoid fraud, they may replace paper voting.

My thoughts on the matter, anyway.. Your thoughts are welcome, too