ClearVoting is a voting system that, combining the good points of paper voting with those of electronics, guarantees quick, honest and verifiable results.

ClearVoting is not electronic voting but rather a Computer Aided Paper Voting in which computing is kept to a minimum to allow true democratic checks over elections.

ClearVoting uses offline PCs as polling booths. They simply print the ballot paper according to the elector's choice. Each elector verifies that on the printed ballot paper its written what he/she ment to write (voter verified ballot paper, VVBP). Run a voting demo

Obviously each PC counts the votes it prints! This is a very simple action but it's extremely important if we want to trust electronic results. Thus it must be coded in a really verifiable way to avoid that PCs print the proper ballot papers, so that elector are happy with them, but then record and count a different vote. Thus a special software must be used at least for counting. ClearVoting uses such a special kind of software not only for counting votes but also for printing ballot papers and for any other activity.

ClearVoting works as a polling room composed of a few polling booths. At the close of voting the results of each polling room are locally tallied up and made public. Since polling rooms are not connected to any network:

ClearVoting, for the sake of vote secrecy, knows nothing about voters' identity and it uses candidate's votes counters. Each time a vote is cast for a candidate, his/her vote counter is incremented by one and nothing is stored about the voter (see What it isn't later on)

ClearVoting gives every confidence in its elecronic results. Nevertheless it is wise to manually count the VVBPs of some polling rooms, provided the latter are randomly chosen after their electronic results have been published.

ClearVoting also consists of a web site hosted by a public authority in charge of the election. The site will be open to the public and it will receive and publish one by one all the results coming from the polling stations. The general result of the election will be computed upon the local data published on the web site.

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).

ClearVoting is not a system that identifies voters, nor is it a system that authorizes them to vote. These functions have been deliberately omitted because they would require a connection either to the registers of the various municipalities or to the Ministry of the Interior in order to access the database of citizens that have the right to vote, and if the polling room were to have external connections, this could undermine the voters' trust, and that of public opinion, in the voting system.

ClearVoting is not a system that collects results of the polling rooms. Such function has been deliberately omitted because it would require polling room to have external connections that could undermine the voters' trust, and that of public opinion, in the voting system. Collecting results from polling rooms can be done in several way (by computers not connected to any booth, by fax, by phone, by paper official statements...). It could also be done online provided that the connection to any external network is visible to everybody (thus it is by cable and not wireless) and it is always unplugged during voting.

Pure electronic vote is a peril to democracy and almost anybody knows or feels it. All over the world many groups and organizations fight the use of electronic voting (see my site about electronic voting). But while we talk against e-voting, companies sell electronic voting machines and people vote using them! Thus every year more and more people has to blindly trust electoral results having lost any chance to verify their correctness.

I'm not sure that we'll be able to halt the use of computers in voting because companies are lobbying and politicians doesn't see the peril (or they prefer not to see it!). So, probably, the best thing to do is to ride the tiger and propose a voting system in which computing is kept to a minimum so that its behaviour can be really verified by the public. This is exactly what ClearVoting is.

Thanks to its unique characteristics ClearVoting can preserve our society from voting fiascos and from loosing faith in democracy.