Electoral

In the 21st Century, it seems incredible that most countries still use a paper ballot for their elections. Recently, some of the most advanced countries have turned to electronic voting, with a generally high level of success, but growing concern amongst electoral watchdogs has seen terminal manufacturers latterly including a paper record such as to provide the facility of a “hard copy” audit trail. The thought behind this move is, that if required, a poll could be reconstructed using these paper records. Even without going that far, a sample of any poll could be reconstructed by verifying terminal electronic output against respective paper record, thereby providing a high level of confidence in what is supposed to be a paperless system.

One such terminal manufacturer is Sequoia in the USA: their successful EDGE terminal is installed with VVPAT - Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail. This allows the voter to view a hard copy output of all votes they have cast, which is then accepted by making a single keystroke. This final action prints a summary of the votes cast in a proprietary, high density, 2D barcode format (PDF417). Voter records are stored on paper rolls.

Euclid has developed a system to read the VVPAT output and enable recompilation of any vote. This unit is defined as VVPAT-R or Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail - Reader.