Furtwangen, February 06, 2008 – The new procedure allows voters to check that their vote has been counted correctly using a printed receipt.
Security does not depend on the voting computer, but on a trustworthy random number generator, which can be more effectively protected against manipulation than a computer.
Reiner SCT, market leader in secure chip card readers for multifunctional applications, has developed the specific procedure for this application on the basis of a certified chip card reader.
As soon as the voter has made their decision at the voting machine, the generator is activated and a random number is generated.
This is displayed to the voter and transmitted to the voting machine at the same time.
The previously generated random number is replaced by the current one, which the voter can check using their receipt.
The real advantage of Bingo Voting is that the receipt does not show a third party how the vote was cast.
In this way, the process avoids vote buying and blackmail, but still allows the count to be verified.
This is not possible with established paper-based procedures and so-called paper trail procedures and improves the verifiability of the election result.
Bingo Voting has now been used for the first time in a real election.
Two prototypes were implemented and used for the student parliament election at the University of Karlsruhe (TH) in January.
Jörn-Müller Quade from the European Institute for System Security (EISS) at the University of Karlsruhe: “We were surprised at how well the process worked given the challenge of an election with 70 candidates and nine votes per voter. There were no serious technical problems, but there were some indications for future improvements, for example in the speed of voting. Further confirmation of the accuracy of our approach came when our voting machine was able to show that the manual poll book contained two incorrect entries.”
“We are delighted to be able to support this project and make it possible for the first election in Germany to be held using a cryptographically secure voting process,” says Klaus Bechtold, Managing Director of REINER SCT.
Further information on the voting procedure can be found at www.bingovoting.de.
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