Punchscan - Basic Auditing Procedures

Basic Auditing Procedures

The voter's ballot receipt does not indicate which candidate the voter cast their ballot for, and therefore it is not secret information. After an election, the election authority will post an image of each receipt online. The voter can look up her ballot by typing in the serial number and she can check that information held by the election authority matches her ballot. This way, the voter can be confident that her ballot was cast as intended.

Any voter or interested party can also inspect part of the database to ensure the results were calculated correctly. They cannot inspect the whole database, otherwise they could link votes to ballot serial numbers. However, half of the database can be safely inspected without breaking privacy. A random choice is made between opening or (this choice can be derived from the secret key or from a true random source, such as dice or the stock market). This procedure allows the voter to be confident that the set of all ballots were counted as cast.

If all ballots are counted as cast and cast as intended, then all ballots are counted as intended. Therefore the integrity of the election can be proven to a very high probability.

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