Cryptographic voting debuts
Last week, in Takoma Park, Md., a new cryptographic voting system that could ensure accurate vote counts was used for the first time in a real election. MIT’s Ron Rivest, the Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, helped develop the system and says he’s quite pleased with how the technology worked. Takoma Park’s city clerk, Jessie Carpenter, agrees that the trial “went very well.” To minimize the disruption of existing voting procedures, the system, called Scantegrity II, was designed to work with ordinary optical-scan voting technology. Optical-scan voting — which has become the dominant technology in the United States since the 2000 presidential election — usually requires the voter to fill in bubbles printed on a ballot next to candidates’ names. With Scantegrity II, the voter instead uses a special pen to expose a code printed inside the bubble in invisible ink. Thereafter, the ballot is fed into an...