Defining a trusted voting process

["David Webber \(XML\)" <david@drrw.info>]

Team,

I few weeks back I joined the Maryland True Voting technical team here in
the USA.

Attached PPT is the results of that interaction.

It's just a draft right now - but what my aim is here is to understand what
can
make a trusted voting process - where you combine paper and e-Voting
together to make use of the best of both worlds.

I'm not sure what research has been thrown at this in the past - if any -
but
I just came at this from sound engineering principles in building systems.

So - I want it to be:

1) simple and obvious
2) doable with off-the-shelf stuff - no fancy patented techniques needed
3) fault tolerant - in that it thwarts all obvious attacks by the nature of
its
    process.

Obviously nothing is foolproof - because conspirators could
pose as legimate staff and negate the safeguards - but that's a
social problem not a software engineering problem!

Clearly the level of detail in the PPT is just intended as an overview.
If you are going to spec' this out completely - you need to define
each mechanism rigorously - and also create lots of XML - but
then we are good at that here in OASIS!

Thoughts?

Thanks, DW

Ballot Processing Systems.ppt