An introduction to PunchScan

Abstract

PunchScan is a precinct-read optical-scan balloting system that allows voters to take their ballot with them after scanning. This does not violate the secret ballot principle because the ballots cannot be read without secret information held by the distributed authority in charge of the election. In fact, this election authority will publish the ballots for everyone to see, allowing voters whose ballots were incorrectly omitted to complain. PunchScan vote-counting is performed in private by the election authority - who uses their secret information to decode the ballots - but is verified in public by an auditor.In this paper we describe how and why PunchScan works. We have kept most of the description at an outline level so that it may be used as a straw model of a cryptographic voting system. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.