Games, Diversions & Perl Culture

Chapter 41. Secure Internet Voting

Lincoln D. Stein

As I write this, canvassing boards in Palm Beach and Broward Counties, Florida, are desperately trying to get manual recounts done in time for a court-imposed deadline. Countless lawsuits and countersuits launched by the Republican and Democratic adversaries are in various stages of adjudication, citizens are up in arms because they feel they have been disenfranchised by poorly-designed “butterfly ballots” and other election day mistakes, the Florida legislature has threatened to take the election into its own hands, and the U.S. Supreme Court has just agreed to add its considerable weight to the fracas.

All this because many of Florida’s counties ballot using the Hollerith punchcard, an antiquated balloting technology whose main virtue is its low price tag. On the nightly news, election officials discourse gravely on “chads,” those little bits of paper that some voters have trouble dislodging. We hear of pregnant chads, hanging chads, and dimpled chads. One election board volunteer is even accused of having eaten the chads that dropped out of the ballots he was handling.

Is this any way to run an election? I don’t think so. Fortunately, Perl can help rebuild democracy, and in this article I’ll show a simple Perl-based framework for a secure Internet-based balloting system.

About Secure Elections

Much of the inspiration for this article comes from Bruce Schneier’s magnum opus Applied Cryptography and specifically from section 6.1, “Secure ...