*** Welcome to piglix ***

Scantegrity


Scantegrity is a security enhancement for optical scan voting systems, providing such systems with end-to-end (E2E) verifiability of election results. It uses confirmation codes to allow a voter to prove to themselves that their ballot is included unmodified in the final tally. The codes are privacy-preserving and offer no proof of which candidate a voter voted for. Receipts can be safely shown without compromising ballot secrecy.

Scantegrity II prints the confirmation codes in invisible ink to improve usability and dispute resolution. As the system relies on cryptographic techniques, the ability to validate an election outcome is both software independent as well as independent of faults in the physical chain-of-custody of the paper ballots. The system was developed by a team of researchers including cryptographers David Chaum and Ron Rivest.

Optical scan voting systems produce an electronic tally, while maintaining the original paper ballots which can be rescanned or manually hand-counted to provide an ostensibly corroborative tally. However, the correctness of each of these tallies requires the voter to either trust that the software is error-free and has not been hacked, or that the physical chain-of-custody of the ballots has not been broken at any point. Other E2E voting systems such as Punchscan and ThreeBallot, address these issues but require existing polling place equipment and procedures to be greatly altered or replaced. In contrast, Scantegrity is an add-on meant to be used in conjunction with existing optical scan equipment, thereby requiring fewer hardware and software and procedural modifications.

For all other voters, the ballot marking procedure is essentially identical to conventional optical scan paper-ballots. Similarly, the underlying system still produces both an electronic tally as well as a human readable through which manual recounts can still be conducted.


...
Wikipedia

...