Reply #5: Schneier is missing the most critical part of all

[BevHarris]

1. The total number of voter-verified votes must be auditable and retained as physical evidence.

The weakness of all cryptography schemes for verifying the vote is that they do not maintain an independent, physical evidence trail that is verified by the voter. While you can verify your own vote, no one can examine the evidence of ALL the voter verified votes at once.

This leads to schemes where the system can pass a spot check (voter checks his own vote) and still stuff the electronic ballot box, or read from two different sets of books, or a multitude of other corruptions.

Cryptography solutions also violate another tenet of basic accounting: Transparency. Everyone needs to be able to SEE the evidence trail. While we may use electronic banking, I can assure you that you can't get a CPA to sign off on an audit using only your electronic banking trail. They need independent, physical documentation. The only proper way to do this is with independently verified (voter verified) physical evidence trail (print ballots from voting machine, store them in ballot box).

Bev