Electronic voting
A friend of mine Stefan Popoveniuc, a Romanian Ph.D. student at GWU is part of a team that has been working on a new electronic voting system called Scantegrity for several years now. The system can be used in a similar way to current paper ballot systems (i.e. making a mark of your vote on a printed ballot), while at the same time allowing the voter to check that their vote was properly counted after the election, simply by going to a website and putting in a code. Because of the way the system is designed to use encryption, the vote remains anonymous. Only the person that voted can check their own vote because they are the only ones that know that code stands for on their ballot.
The system is getting more and more recognition in the past months and I am happy to see that news has also reached TVs at home ( TVR video here ). My sincere thanks to Mihai Melinescu for his efforts to come down and record this material during the extremely busy election day!
If you want to find out more about the system, please visit Scantegrity.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is the proof that a free system based on sharing can work and not only does it work, but it works better than the commercial equivalent (at least in my opinion). I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t end up looking something up using this amazing resource.
So, go ahead, support Wikipedia! Do it in whatever way you can, whether financially or by submitting content!*
* I am planning on starting a big Wikipedia-based project in the not too distant future to expand some sections that I care about and I feel are insufficiently developed. If you think you would be interested in helping out, let me know and I’ll give you more details.
