Reply #3: This article may really describe a truly "fair" e-voting machine...

[indigonation]

designed by a "birkenstock techie" that wasn't ready by Nov 2004. If these truly exist, we have to demand that these be considered from our state legislators with their HAVA funds.

Tilting at the Ballot Box -Business 2.0; September 2004 Issue

Entrepreneur David Chaum's e-money venture flopped. Now he wants to fix electronic voting. For once, is the brilliant inventor right on time?
By John Heilemann, August 18, 2004

The legendary cryptographer David Chaum has just invented something amazing, and his timing is nearly perfect. At a moment when electronic voting has been turned -- by a confluence of clueless election officials, slipshod technologies, dodgy vendors, and ever vigilant geeks -- from a great leap forward into an abject fiasco, Chaum has unveiled an e-voting system that's everything the current gizmos aren't. It's incredibly secure. It guarantees anonymity. Its results are verifiable. It is, Chaum claims, "the first electronic mechanism that ensures both integrity and privacy." Indeed, as far as I can see, Chaum's invention has only one conceivable drawback: It won't be on the market in time to save us on Nov. 2.

As veterans of the digital revolution will recall, solving apparently insoluble problems has always been Chaum's forte. Most famously, back in 1990, he founded the company DigiCash to commercialize his pioneering work on electronic money. Even by the standards of that heady time, Chaum's ambitions were lofty: propelling the international currency system into the digital age. But while everyone agreed that the technologies he invented were elegant and brilliant, the world, it turned out, wasn't nearly ready for the incursion of e-money. At the end of 1998, DigiCash bit the dust.


Technology writer Steven Levy once described Chaum as "Don Quixote in Birkenstocks." Today the Birkenstocks are gone, but the beard, ponytail, and quixotic temperament all remain in place. Once again, the windmill he's tilting at is an entrenched and archaic system. And once again he's starting a new company to profit from his ingenuity. If there were any justice or logic in this world, his success would be guaranteed. But since the world we're talking about is national politics, I fear he faces an uphill fight.

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