> How do you know that the software generating the audit trail is playing > fair if it's closed source? > > Sometimes, IMHO, there's just no alternative to pen and paper. Surely > the manual method of ticking a box and having multiple human vote > counters checking ballots is the best option going, even if it is more > expensive. (I confess I've no idea what costs are involved either way.) i don't think that you can save a lot of money, if you implement the same 'security' and 'auditability'. i've monitored two elections in an east european country this year. people's confidence into democracy isn't very strong in this country and there might have been some incidences that you wouldn't expect within long established democracies but in general the premisses are the same. from my point of view you cannot guarantee any human auditability without a paper trail, in the form that the voting machine prints a ballot that will be put into a ballot box within public sight, meaning that independent monitors can see that everybody throws exactly one ballot into that box. thus you will need some kind of election comitee in every polling station that takes care of those ballot boxes (seals them after the vote and securely transports them to the next authority). like this you will maybe save on the counting, but with voting districts not bigger than 2000 people human counting took no longer than 3 hours and you will not save on bureaucratic processes that account the proper procedures with sealing and handing over the ballot boxes. from my expirience with voting in not so established democracies it becomes clear that the whole voting process has to be understandable by everybody not only some tech geeks and crypto specialists. because if some provincial politicians are not able to verify the fairness of the vote they will call for a recount. OOS even with Open Source Hardware (yes who tells me that Party A's votes don't get counted by a chip that calculates 1+1=3) with Public Records cannot be sufficient for that. Because if Joe and Jane Average don't understand the process the same way Bruce Schneier does they have the right for a manual recount and than we haven't saved any money. That's democracy. Not everything that can be done by machines is automatically better, as if we would do it by hand. float -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- _ | .''`.Florian Klinglmueller ASCII ribbon campaign ( ) | : :' :debian-ppc user - against HTML email X | `. `'` & vCards / \ | `- float@xxxxxxxxxx ------------------------------------------------------------------------