I am not sure that method of voting is that much more secure.
They can be lost, miscounted, and ballot box stuffing is easy in areas where the party in power has a problem with integrity.
What I would suggest is a project that involves the Schools of Computer Science in a group of major technical colleges across the nation...say 4 or 5.
Lets say students from several graduate schools are challenged to produce a safe, secure, and demonstrably accurate voting program on a platform that uses an operating system created just for voting.
Each school is in competition with the others.
When all of them have a candidate, they pass it on to another school, and receive the candidate from another school. Then they try their best to break into it.
After a set time period, the program goes back to the school that created it, and they fix it.
Then the process starts again, but the candidate is passed to a different school.
Again, the program is challenged severely and passed back to the originating school.
The first school to survive 2 challenges with no serious hacks wins.
And that program goes to another group of schools who each look at ways it can be hacked.
Results are passed back to the winning school.
This cycle continues until the program survives.
It then becomes the new national voting platform and program.
After every election, there is a review to insure everything was okay.
And, additional challenges are done to the program to make sure it is still robust enough to resist even the most severe attempts to compromise it.
As a computer scientist, I think this will work.
But vigilance is still needed.
In any event, the current system of computerized voting with proprietary software is badly broken and needs to be scrapped.
In the meantime, I would like to see old style mechanical machines used instead of paper ballots.
But, please, no hanging chads!
Patrick Phillips
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