The Trusted Random Number Generator
The secrecy of the vote, the fact that the printed receipt does not reveal how a vote was cast, depends on the numbers generated in the voting booth being sufficiently random that they cannot be identified.
To ensure that voters have confidence in the randomness of the numbers generated in the booth, the authors of the Bingo voting method suggest that a simple, transparent random number generator be used, such as a mechanical "bingo" number generator, the kind with numbered balls inside a spinning cage (hence the method's name). Sensors could be used to read the generated number and pass it to the voting machine. Such a solution would have high voter trust but might be impractical. In a real-life test, a student parliament election, the authors used modified smart card readers as the random number generators. One of the authors makes the point that a separate random number generator can be more effectively protected from manipulation than can a voting machine.
Read more about this topic: Bingo Voting
Famous quotes containing the words trusted, random, number and/or generator:
“Suspicion all our lives shall be stuck full of eyes;
Treason is but trusted like the fox,
Who never so tame, so cherished and locked up,
Will have a wild trick of his ancestors.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“poor Felix Randal;
How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great gray drayhorse his bright and battering
sandal!”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“In the U.S. for instance, the value of a homemaker’s productive work has been imputed mostly when she was maimed or killed and insurance companies and/or the courts had to calculate the amount to pay her family in damages. Even at that, the rates were mostly pink collar and the big number was attributed to the husband’s pain and suffering.”
—Gloria Steinem (20th century)
“He admired the terrible recreative power of his memory. It was only with the weakening of this generator whose fecundity diminishes with age that he could hope for his torture to be appeased. But it appeared that the power to make him suffer of one of Odette’s statements seemed exhausted, then one of these statements on which Swann’s spirit had until then not dwelled, an almost new word relayed the others and struck him with new vigor.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)