National: DARPA-backed voting system for soldiers abroad savaged | Thomas Claburn/The Register

In February, VotingWorks, a non-profit election technology developer, showed off a prototype of an encrypted voting system. With funding support from DARPA, the project aims to make it easier for service personnel to vote in US elections when stationed outside of the United States. Their proposed system – dubbed CACvote in reference to military smart ID cards called “Common Access Cards” – consists of four elements: voting kiosks at military bases for military personnel; a computer system that receives ballots from those kiosks; a cryptographic protocol for encoding and transmitting ballots, which also get printed and mailed; and a risk-limiting audit (RLA) protocol intended to detect integrity violations (eg, hacking) that alter an election outcome, and to correct the outcome. The latter two elements – the cryptographic protocol and the RLA – collectively are known as MERGE, which stands for Matching Electronic Results with Genuine Evidence. Paper ballots represent said evidence. According to an analysis paper from Andrew Appel, professor of computer science at Princeton University, and Philip Stark, professor of statistics at UC Berkeley, MERGE “contains interesting ideas that are not inherently unsound” but isn’t realistic given the legal, institutional, and practical changes necessary to make it work. Read Article