Page 138 - Towards Trustworthy Elections New Directions in Electronic Voting by Ed Gerck (auth.), David Chaum, Markus Jakobsson, Ronald L. Rivest, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Josh Benaloh, Miroslaw Kutylowski, Ben Adida ( (z-lib.org (1)

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that vote secrecy and tallying integrity are mutually exclusive guarantees that a
fully electronic voting system can offer.
In other words, with fully electronic elections, there is no way to have vote secrecy
and tallying integrity protected in the same run because, to use a simplifying meta-
phor, these promises are like two sides of a coin. A coin representing the electronic
voting system, with value corresponding to that of the electoral process it can execute,
but a coin that cannot be "flipped" to show both sides during an election because it
executes the election in a single run, without the possibility of recount for auditing
purposes (due to dematerialization of the votes).
One can argue about whether and how Dr. Mercuri's work can rigorously lead to
9
such conclusion , but the weight of its scientific arguments can be felt in many fronts.
For instance, as an answer to the central question raised here, from Brazil's pattern of
“collateral entanglements”. Or, in electoral legislation across the U.S., under pressure
from civil and grassroots movements, specially after dubious ethics from main DRE
suppliers began to surface [3], [4]. Between March 2004 and May 2005, fourteen fed-
erated states approved laws requiring voting machines to allow for Voter-Verifiable
Printed Audit Trails (VVPAT), to retain or recover the supervising capacity common
voters unquestionably had before elections were computerized.
Before July 2006, 27 U.S. states have such laws already sanctioned, thirteen of
them with mandatory manual audit. Only fifteen U.S. states appeared to see no prob-
lem yet with DREs. As for the U.S. Congress, several bills aimed at assuring that
VVPAT becomes a federal tenet for electoral supervising processes are being consid-
ered. This, not to naively pretend to do away with election fraud, but to put all of their
forms in a hard-playing leveled field, that is, to expose the ways to defraud – old and
new – to the risk of detection by common voters in due time. In other words, to give
back to common voters – with no PhD in Computer Science – their legitimate right to
supervise elections with autonomy.

6 Routes to Electronic Elections
Each democracy has to answer the call to go modern, if for no other reason then be-
cause of the massive lobbying by DRE suppliers, the larger of which has gone global.
A special look at the route taken by Brazil seems warranted, if not because of its pio-
neering widespread use of DREs, then because of the keen interest its system has
raised within the Organization of American States (OAS), or because Brazil’s de-
ployment took a route leading to a landscape quite distinct from what has been por-
trayed by lobbies, by Brazil's mainstream media and by specialized global media, and
10
perhaps also quite distinct from the route the U.S. seems to be taking .

9
In the same year Mercuri defended her PhD thesis, for instance, Berry Schoenmaker
published the article “Fully Auditable Electronic Secret-Ballot Elections”:
http://www.xootic.nl/magazine/jul-2000/schoenmakers.pdf
10
As far as we can tell, Brazil is unique among modern democratic republics in concentrating,
in a single institution, the electoral functions from the three powers a republic should keep
separate, namely, those to legislate, to execute and to adjudicate. This institution, called
'Electoral Justice', is organized as a branch of the Judiciary, and binded only by the Constitu-
tion and federal election laws. The Constitution and electoral laws compel all statutory,
executive and adjudicative matters regarding official elections into a Kafkean system of
'electoral tribunals', one for each state, all under a federal 'Superior Electoral Tribunal' [TSE].