MIT’s Scantegrity II voting machine to minimize electoral fraud
Electoral systems throughout the world have been criticized time and again for their inability to conduct free and fair elections that provide a transparent mandate. Democracy or dictatorship, allegations of electoral fraud, voting discrepancies to alter popular verdict has become a norm irrespective of the nature of political establishment. This could soon change, if MIT’s Ron Rivest, the Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is to be believed, since he seems very pleased with the results of the new cryptographic voting systems.
To minimize the disruption of existing voting procedures, the system, called Scantegrity II allows the user to use a special pen to expose a code printed inside the bubble in invisible ink. Thereafter, the ballot is fed into an ordinary optical reader, which simple determines which bubble has been marked. Any voter who would like to confirm the vote can simply jot down the code that’s in the exposed bubble, along with the ballots’ serial number and later use the name to correlate with the results of the election commission.
Besides, Scantegrity ensures that if just 2 percent of voters confirm their codes, it’s statistically almost impossible for vote tampering to go undetected. After the election, the election commission releases some of the information contained in the tables — including the codes exposed on all the recorded ballots — along with encryption keys that verify its authenticity. The partially revealed tables conceal enough information to preserve voter anonymity.
There’s no way to figure out which ballot went for which candidate. But they reveal enough information that anyone interested in performing an audit can ferret out fraud. Undoubtedly, Scantegrity II is a potential move towards minimizing electoral frauds and ensuring greater democratic success.
Via: MIT
