[EM] Election Certification

[Ken Johnson]

A long, long, long time ago there was some discussion in this group 
about touch screen voting machines and verifiable secure voting. Last 
year I formalized some ideas from this discussion and wrote a paper, 
which may be of interest to some of this group's participants:

Johnson, Kenneth C, "Election Certification by Statistical Audit of 
Voter-Verified Paper Ballots" (October 31, 2004). 
http://ssrn.com/abstract=640943

One of the things I found was that the analysis of a conventional 
statistical recount is quite complicated - I only considered the case of 
a two-candidate race and wouldn't want to attempt more complicated 
cases. However, the alternative method that I advocate ("statistical 
error count") is much simpler and could be easily generalized to work 
with multiple candidates and alternative voting systems.

Ken Johnson

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