An associate and myself have often thought about making a vote system very similar to what you describe. Voting systems are not rocket science and as long as the code is open source, all machines can be certified by software engineer representatives of both parties prior to an election. Once the code in the machine is validated, making it "hack-proof" and "fraud-proof" are actually not that difficult.

A generic computer could not be used. The reality is that no-one wants to go to a voting booth and vote on a PC. And if it's running Windows or just about any other OS, the potential for security violations is high when the voter has physical access to the input device.

The hardware should be similar to what they use now but, in all honesty, it should be driven by a microcontroller that is OS-less so that all the code that is being run is visible in the source code and easily inspected. Any OS would make the system so large that most of the code the system is running would be hidden in the OS and that's just as unacceptable as proprietary voting machines.

In my opinion, a very fraud-proof electronic voting system could be developed quite easily. But there are special interests at play and I doubt even the perfect voting system would be easy to sell--or even give away. I personally don't believe that Diebold et al are actually rigging their machines to favor anybody, but I'm sure they're protecting their market segment with appropriate bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H "contributions" to those in power.

Regards,
Craig Steiner