In the wake of President Trump’s ludicrous lies about illegal votes in November’s election — immediately after the lies about the size of the audience for his inauguration — it’s tempting to just point and laugh at his apparent insecurity and fears of illegitimacy. He does, though, inadvertently raise a point worth considering: how can we strengthen the integrity of our voting systems?
After all, the sitting president is eager to call those systems into question after he wins ; this makes it seem likely that he — and the party he represents — will sooner or later begin to reject the result of elections they lose. Can technology help us to ensure that elections, and their results, continue to be free and fair? (Modulo suppression of voters who simply aren’t allowed to register/vote, of course; there’s not much technology can do about that.)
The answer is, briefly, “yes.” In fact quite a lot of research has gone into end-to-end auditable voting systems , i.
