Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Random thoughts on ballot-stuffing detection

Here's a random thought I had while musing about the controversy in Iran regarding its elections and possible ballot stuffing:

Consider a system which has pairs of unique stickers printed. Now when a voter finishes their voting, then the voting official will take one of the stickers and place it on the side of the voter sign-in logs, and place the other sticker on the ballot. Ordinarily this would cause voter-privacy issues. But if the voter sign-in logs are sliced in half beforehand (ideally cutting through the sticker leaving a non-unique portion attached to the name of the voter, the unique portion of the sticker separate from the name of the voter) and then each individual unique sticker-piece is also separated from all others and shuffled, then after the election you have a set of verified ballot IDs that are guaranteed to be issued to unique voters.

A couple notes:
  • There is theoretically nothing stopping someone from hijacking a bunch of pairs of stickers, and stuffing the ballot box that way and then attaching them to the voter sign-in logs right before slicing. However, this scheme reduces the time for that attack to "until the voter sign-in logs are sliced".
  • This also allows for easy verification whether a particular voter voted.

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