Follow-up stories

Smith actually considers follow-up stories 2 and 4 to be objectively of greater importance than the original story.


1. Not long after Rivest & Smith, cryptographer David Chaum invented a new approach to simple secure voting he calls Scantegrity (our sketch). In at least some ways, it is better than the Rivest-Smith schemes: it does not require trusted "magic" machines at the polling place, and allows voters to vote normally. It also is fairly simple – although not as simple as Rivest-Smith and without the "easy upgrade mix-in" property – and can be implemented either with or without cryptography. The final word evidently has not been spoken about how to make voting secure, but these techniques evidently open up a whole new world.

2. Range voting has been used by honeybees for millions of years. Honeybees are by far the most experienced democrats on the planet and observations and simulations indicate that thanks to their use of range voting, they successfully get the best winner in elections, far more often than human voters do.

3. Instant Runoff Voting has many flaws and is less-desirable, less-simple, and less-easy to adopt than range voting.

4. Smith has invented a simple districting method, the "shortest splitline algorithm," that abolishes gerrymandering. Ivan Ryan used US census data to produce pictures of how all 50 states would look with shortest splitline.

5. How might Rivest/Smith antifraud voting protocols impact current chaos in Kenya and Pakistan?


Return to main page