Attack Iraq with an IPAQ
In this interesting Washington Post artcile, there is a highlight of some of the flaws in electronic voting.
I have long thought that low cost/high security electronic voting's it’s the key to future democracy not only in the western world but in the third world.
E-Voting has to be open source. It has to be public reviewed. It has to be transparent at every stage, unlike in the article.
But enough about this…..
Imagine a device, like a ruggedised IPAQ.
- It has a finger scanner.
- It has a SD card.
- It has GPRS/Wifi
I guess it would cost about 200
These devices I will call a Portable Polling Station.
The PPS has one function, it will take a register an individual by their fingerpring and then allow them to vote on a candidate by their picture on the screen.
Once it has the vote it will encrypt the vote and the fingerprint hash and save that in memory, on the SD card as well as send it "home" over GRPS and, if in range, share it with any other PPCs by WIFI. The PPSs form a network of robust data sharing, the data being the votes.
- To a significant degree of certainty, people can only vote once. If someone tries to vote twice then the second vote wouldn’t be registered because of the finger print duplication.
- Whether used portably in the Tora Bora or in hard polling stations in Umbongo the PPS system has a coherence of polling results and tolerance for fraud that seems to far exceed paper based polling.
- Because just the hashes are registered there are no issues of voter security, the polls are still anonymous.
The system is rough. Trying to help democracy get a foot hold in tough places is rough.
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