About a year ago we had Josh Benaloh of Microsoft Research as a guest lecturer in a UW course on computing security. He talked about the cryptographic side of

About a year ago we had Josh Benaloh of Microsoft Research as a guest lecturer in a UW course on computing security. He talked about the cryptographic side of voting systems, some of the papers on his page are a good place to begin: http://research.microsoft.com/users/benaloh/ http://research.microsoft.com/users/benaloh/ Edit: there are systems that can provably work, tally votes in encrypted form, and provide a reasonable audit trail all while maintaining privacy. Unfortunately the contracts for voting machines don't seem to be awarded based on technical merit -- which, ironically, is entirely a function of who we voted for in the past.