Friday, September 29, 2006

Software designers should rule

The world is now so complex that it doesn’t seem safe to let lawyers and politicians run everything. Take voting. People are rushing to install voting machines. The trouble is that they don’t have an audit trail. How could you construct an election so that everyone could see that their vote was counted, and could ensure that many types of election fraud could be detected? And could you do that without using encryption? Ronald L. Rivest, a (famous) professor at MIT has a system that does this, and it is pretty clever. Maybe software designers should run things for a while.

1 comment:

  1. I don't hold with voting machines. Paper ballots are your only man.

    ReplyDelete