How the Transparent voting system handles security

Transparent voting is secured by the voters who will validate their ballots. Current systems must be validated by a government agency. The voters will provide several times the validation currently provided. The system also provides for special test votes to be processed through the system so that election officials can trivially audit for proper operation.

Transparent voting is designed to be an open system with respect to public review. Rather than being "open source" (meaning that anyone can modify the system), the logic of this system will be available, but we will be taking care of any modifications necessary. This means that the logic of its design will be validated by countless experts. This also means that the process of converting the design into a program that runs on a computer (a process called compiling or building) can be observed and validated by experts.

In addition, Transparent voting allows an electronic ballot to be prepared outside the voting facility. This means that properly prepared mail-in (absentee) ballots can be easily entered on Election Day. Once the absentee ballot is processed, that voter's name can be struck from the list of eligible voters, preventing an illegal vote from being cast at the voting facility. This also allows a voter to trivially declare that they will not vote, and thus eliminates the possibility of a third party presuming to vote for such a voter.

Finally, votes are most susceptible to tampering at the central computer where the votes are stored. Most electronic voting systems have vulnerabilities in a significant number if not all polling places. Even though tampering will be revealed by the nature of this system, it is still better to have fewer places where the system is vulnerable. Even these risks will be extremely limited. The only sort of information which can come into the central computer are the votes which are being received as part of an election, requests from voters who want to see how their votes are recorded, and requests for the count of votes (election results). The central computer will not be connected to machines outside their secure facility in a general sense and will not be susceptible to the tampering and hacking from the world wide web which plagues so many computers. Any tampering with the central computer would have to be performed by persons at the secure facility - presumably persons very willing to go to prison.

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