Communications of the ACM
Team at Rice Builds Machine to Transform the Way We Vote
The team behind the STAR vote machine wanted to create a digital system with easily verifiable results.
Credit: Houston Chronicle
Rice University researchers say they have developed a prototype voting machine designed to restore faith and trust in the U.S. election system. The Security, Transparency, Auditability, and Reliability (STAR) Vote system records an electronic vote and then prints out a copy of the paper ballot, which the voter can verify and put in a ballot box. If issues are raised about the accuracy of electronically counted results, STAR Vote conducts automatic audits, comparing a statistical sample of the paper ballots with the digital records to confirm the outcomes.
"The savings are just enormous over doing a recount," says University of California, Berkeley professor Philip Stark.
STAR Vote is inexpensively constructed from commercially available computers and printers, which Rice scientist Dan Wallach says will make its cost only half of the current norm. The Rice researchers say sophisticated software, which they plan to release as open source, will make up for the low-cost hardware. The dual paper/digital ballot record the machine provides also can uncover attempts to tamper with the vote, according to Wallach. The team has published design specifications for manufacturers that want to bid on the contract to design and build the STAR Vote machine.
From Houston Chronicle
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