Patent application for electronic voting using trusted computing
Posted by Ken Y-N on March 19th, 2009 at 03:47pm
The US Patent and Trademark Office recently published a patent application from IBM entitled System for electronic voting using a trusted computing platform, application number 2009/0076891. The abstract is as follows:
An apparatus for executing a trusted electronic voting system under the control of an election authority comprising: at least one electronic voting machine; an election configuration for the voting machine in the electronic voting system; and a trusted computing platform for the voting machine in the electronic voting system.
Trusted computing can handle the case of tampering with the voting machines when they are in the field, and important aspect of ensuring secure electronic voting, but it cannot of course address the problem of the software developer inserting a backdoor.
Call me a Luddite if you will, but I will always be a fan of hand-counting a big X on a bit of paper.
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