1. people vote touching the LCD screen of a computer kiosk placed in a polling room
2. polling rooms are not connected to any data transmission network
3. on voting, the name of the candidate voted for is printed on a voter verified ballot paper (VVBP) that has the status of sole legal vote: in case of doubts it wins over bytes!
4. the VVBP is checked by the elector and kept in the ballot box of the kiosk

   Please watch the Voting animation

5. there are no void ballots, void votes, contested votes or blank ballots
6. accessibility is guaranteed according to the guidelines of Web Accessibility Initiative of W3C and special audio/sensorial interfaces allow visually impaired voters to vote unaided
7. on each polling room an absolutely transparent and verifiable Open Source software keeps score of the votes received by each candidate. The process for making such software is named ClearSoftware

   Please watch the ClearSoftware animation
   Please watch the Counting animation

8. when polling ends, results of each polling rooms are immediately made public to those present and through the Internet.
9. manual count of VVBPs printed by pollings room can certify that no error nor fraud happened there.
10. security is guaranteed by the active monitoring of the people and not by electronics

1. voting is done by means of computer kiosks (standard PCs with LCD touchscreen, no keyboard nor mouse)
2. kiosks act as polling booth or as managing booth
3. in each polling room there are one managing booth and several polling booths
4. no booth is connected to the outside of its polling room.
5. polling booths have a printer and a ballot box for VVBPs. Each VVBP is visible to its voter and after being confirmed it is secured in the ballot box of the booth. VVBPs are untouchable by anybody during voting.
6. the managing booth is used by the polling room staff only to let polling booths accept the vote of people that have been identified. For that reason all booths of a single room are connected by means of a cable LAN. No vote is transmitted on the LAN

   Please watch the Polling Rooms animation

   

7. managing and polling booths execute a ClearSoftware compliant Open Source software that is written, produced, published, distributed, installed and executed under the monitoring of the public opinion
8. the software is installed at the opening of election. The installation automatically formats all the disks of the kiosk to eliminate any pre-existing software (possibly virus, trojan, ...)
9. electors vote using the touchscreen of a polling booth. The software
   • presents each electors his/her available candidates (according to the voting district). Special audio/sensorial interfaces allow visually impaired voters to vote unaided
   • collects the vote and asks for a confirmation
   • as soon as a vote has been confirmed on the touchscreen, the software prints a ballot paper that is a piece of paper with the name of the voted candidate printed in clear human-readable text (no bar codes!) The ballot paper is showned to the elector in such a way he/she can't touch it. The elector is requested to confirm that the name printed on the ballot paper is the same name is still visible on the touchscreen.
     • if the elector confirms, the vote becomes official: the software adds one to it's local candidate's votes counter, a word like "confirmed" is printed on the ballot paper (not it's a VVBP!) and it is automatically stored into the black ballot box ofthe polling booth.
     • if the elector rejects claiming the name is badly printed (e.g. low toner), the ballot paper is not written with the word "confirmed", it is stored into the ballot box of the polling booth but the vote is not counted. Elector can vote again
     • if the elector rejects claiming that the printed name is another one, he must prove it showing poll workers that the printed name on the VVBP is different from the one still visible on the touchscreen. This would deny elector his vote privacy, but this is only theoretical because this situation is really unlike to happen. Anyway in case it happens it must trigger a procedure to substitute the polling booth with a new one. Already printed VVBP are placed in a safe place for a later manual count and the faulty polling booth is brought to some forensic analisys.
10. votes are not recorded but simply counted. Each polling booth has a counter for each candidate. Every time a candidate gets a vote his/her counter is incremented by one.
11. when election closes the managing booth collects the counters of its polling booths and tallies them up to produce the result of the polling room. The tallying software is part of the ClearSoftware distribution.
12. results of each polling room are immediately made public to those present and through the Internet.
13. the transmission to the Internet must be offline since polling rooms have no network connections to the outher world. The transmission could also be done online provided that the connection of the polling room to any external network is visible (done by cable and not wireless) and it is always unplugged until the managing booth prints the local result.
14. on the Internet is also published the Open Source downloadable application that computes the general result of the election using the results of each polling room

1. Voting and managing software come with a full operating system which is installed on the booths from scratch when voting starts. ClearVoting auto-installing optical media are produced by a bipartisan technical commission according to the ClearSoftware method. To avoid its manipulations the software is distributed by optical Read-Only media
2. ClearVoting distributions are obviously fully debugged and tested by the bipartisan technical commission before they are actually distributed to polling rooms. Since booths have no networks by which viruses, trojan and attacks could come, ClearVoting distributions are not expected to have problems during real elections
3. the ISO file of the ClearVoting auto-installing media is published on the Internet so that anybody can download it and analise and test it on his/her computer
4. on election day, ClearVoting auto-installing media are distributed to poll workers by local or central authorities.
5. anyboy can verify the contents of each ClearVoting auto-installing media simply computing its MD5 (or similar) checkum and comparing it with the one published on the Internet
6. poll workers power kiosks on and insert ClearVoting auto-installing media in their drives
7. the installation procedure automatically
   • formats ALL disks attached to the kiosk
   • installs the Open Source operating system contained in the ClearVoting distribution
   • asks poll workers whether the kiosk is to be used as a voting or as managing booth
   • installs the required applicative software (voting or managing)
   • power off and reboots the kiosk (now it's a booth!) that now runs the new operating system
   • starts the web browser pointing to the voting or to the managing application.
8. ClearVoting's applicative software, that is the voting and the managing applications, is really short. Infact voting and managing applications are WEB applications written in the high level language PHP which also takes care of all I/O. This avoids applications the need of having coded in themselves tedious and very long instruction blocks to read from / write to files/touchscreen.
   Having short code it's very important because short code is easy to check and debug and this makes highly improbable that pieces of malicious code illicitly inserted there would not be discoverd
9. at boot time, when the freshly installed operating system starts, on each booth is automatically started a web browser (Firefox, Mozilla, Opera ...) having a simplified aspect since it lacks unnecessary buttons ("new window", "exit", "back"...) and toolbars. It cannot be moved, resized, iconized nor quitted (booths have no keyboard nor mouse) thus it stays there from the boot of the booth (!) until the end of voting. The browser points to the first page of the required application (polling applications on polling booths and managing applications on managing booths)
10. voters and poll workers access their application watching the web page shown on their web broswer and make their choices touching the desired links (<a> html tags) on the touchscreen
11. each web browser is locally served by a web server running on the same booth
12. polling application need to contact the managing application running on the managing booth only rarely. Managing application need to contact polling applications running on polling booths every time a new voter enters them (to allow the booth to take voter's vote). All the above communications use the only available network, the (no wireless) LAN connecting each managing booth with its polling booths (all in the same polling room). No other communications ever occur

Please run the Proof Of Concept

 

1. see above points 8, 9 and 10
2. accessibility is guaranteed according to the guidelines of Web Accessibility Initiative of W3C and special audio/sensorial interfaces allow visually impaired voters to vote unaided
3. electors are presented only candidates eligible in the district where the polling room is located
4. electors can choose not to choose any candidate, in which case the VVBP has something like "Blank Vote" printed on it. In this way there are no blank ballots.

 

1. VVBPs are small pieces of paper on which is printed only the name of the voted candidate.
2. VVBPs can be printed on officially certified paper (e.g. by means of background logos or stamps)
3. at the closing of elections, poll workers collect VVBPs from each polling booth of the polling room and place them in a safe container for later manual count (if required)
4. after polling rooms published their results their VVBPs can be counted by hands to verify that no error nor fraud happened. Such manual count can be done
   • in all polling room. In this way electronic results are not taken in account and ClearVoting is used only as a ballot papers printer
   • only in some polling rooms. In this case it is wise that polling rooms to be manually counted are randomly choosen after the election close.

As seen in the Notes ClearVoting has no void ballots, void votes, blank ballots and contestable ballots. This increases the number of voters who contribute to the final result and it also make impossible many fraud.

Furthermore, in contrast to current paper voting procedures, ClearVoting allows sight-impaired voters to vote unaided and in complete privacy.

Obviously no voting system can guarantee honest results if it is not under the REAL monitoring of the public opinion. I mean that it is not enough for a voting system to be monitorable, but it is necessary that such monitoring is actually done.

	paper voting	electronic voting	ClearVoting
votes can undergo a democratic monitoring	YES	NO	YES
electoral procedures can undergo a democratic monitoring	YES	NO	YES
it is possible to avoid vote manipulation	YES	NO	YES
it is possible to illicitly transform a blank ballot into a regular vote	YES	YES	NO
it is possible to illicitly transform a regular vote into a void vote	YES	YES	NO
it is possible to break vote secrecy	NO	YES	NO

The non-existence of void ballots, void votes, blank ballots and contestable ballots reduces the problems of handling the results by eliminating the handling chain of these particular votes and therefore reduces the costs of voting.

The absolute transparency of ClearVoting protects the authorities that organise the elections from a large proportion of the doubts, criticism and post election insinuations that are directed towards them by the opposing political parties, the media and public opinion.

Once ClearVoting has been acquired for running an election, it can be used again in all subsequent elections spending only a small amount for the updating of the list of candidates. Furthermore the computer kiosks that are part of the voting system can be used for other purposes in non-election periods by simply installing the relevant software.

ClearVoting can easily be used in any kind of election. In fact the only part that dependens of the electoral law in force is the Open Source web application that tallies up results from polling rooms and computes how many seats has each party and who they belong to. Customize such web application is easy and cheap.

ClearVoting can be used in any country of the world since internationalization and localization of ClearVoting are easy and cheap as they simply use the same techniques used by web sites.

ClearVoting is not yet a commercial product. I applied for a patent (Italy, n. RM2006A000728) on it and on the making of ClearSoftware. To have a working voting system some investment are required. Any company willing to produce and sell the system, please send me a message.
The development of ClearVoting has no particular theoretical or technical difficulties:

• as far as the computing hardware is concerned, the kiosks are standard PCs that do not require a high amount of power, memory or disk.
• as far the software is concerned, standard analysis and programming is required. Please note that programming involves only the voting and the managing procedures since all the rest (browser, database, interfaces...) comes from the operating system downloaded from the Internet. Voting procedure is very easy to code, analyse and debug because it is 100% written in widely-known high-level programming language (like PHP).