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:
“Self-determination has to mean that the leader is your individual gut, and heart, and mind or we’re talking about power, again, and its rather well-known impurities. Who is really going to care whether you live or die and who is going to know the most intimate motivation for your laughter and your tears is the only person to be trusted to speak for you and to decide what you will or will not do.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“There is a potential 4-6 percentage point net gain for the President [George Bush] by replacing Dan Quayle on the ticket with someone of neutral stature.”
—Mary Matalin, U.S. Republican political advisor, author, and James Carville b. 1946, U.S. Democratic political advisor, author. All’s Fair: Love, War, and Running for President, p. 205, Random House (1994)
“If I could live as a tree, as a river, as the moon, as the sun, as a star, as the earth, as a rock, I would. ...Writing permits me to experience life as any number of strange creations.”
—Alice Walker (b. 1944)
“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)