Okay, yes, civil rights are on the ballot in Maine, and it's utterly crucial that the civil rights of Mainers, whether they're our friends Bill and Common Sense Mainer or other people who we don't know and might not even like, remain intact. And as a New Jersey voter in school just north of Commmunist Country, VA, I'm certainly not de-emphasizing the importance of those elections (though at least in NJ, redistricting power is not at stake since it's done by a non-partisan committee).
Nevertheless, the municipal election being held today in Takoma Park, Maryland is the most important election today. Not because of the candidates or the issues at stake; I know little about that.
Rather, it's because of the election itself. For the first time, American citizens will be able to elect their public officials in a truly end-to-end voter verifiable system. Voters will, in other words, be about to verify that their vote was counted correctly
In a traditional paper ballot system, like the ones used in the Minnesota Senate race that I had ever so much fun looking at (or ones with a voter-verified paper trail) only a limited amount of verifiability is possible.
The voter can verify that their vote was recorded correctly on the paper, and a manual recount can be performed to ensure that the machine count is correct.
However, there is no way for a voter to know that their ballot wasn't destroyed (i.e. shredded) or invalidated (by someone having filled in a second candidate to spoil the ballot, for instance). They have to trust the election authorities to ensure that their ballot is counted correctly.
However, voters today in Takoma Park will NOT have to trust the election authority to have handled their vote properly. They can check for themselves to verify whether or not is what counted. And they can do it without revealing who they voted for (if they could reveal information proving how they voted, that would open an election up to bribery, as well as to savage political machine beatings of anyone who opposed them).
How? With a cryptographic end-to-end voting system called Scantegrity II.
The system works with a combination of `invisible ink' (which reveals confirmation codes upon filling in the ballot with special pens provided by the election authority) and various cryptographic protocols.
If you're interested in some of the specifics, go to the Scantegrity website, which has a video providing a layman's explanation as well as links to technical papers that describe the system in more detail.
The reason I know about it is that the designer of the initial form of Scantegrity (called Punchscan), Stefan Popoveniuc, designed it while a graduate student at George Washington University (he got his Ph.D last spring). However, it has been worked on by many other people, including my research advisor ( My research is explaining cryptanalysis with multiple linear cryptanalysis in a more rigorous manner by viewing it through the lens of coding theory) Poorvi Vora and two of the biggest names in cryptography, David Chaum and Ron Rivest.
Rivest is best known for being one of the coinventors of the RSA (Rivest, Shamir, Adleman) cryptosystem, the first publicly revealed widespread public-key cryptographic system. Professor Rivest was down in DC for the past month because of the Takoma Park election. A week ago, the other two undergraduate students on the same NSF grant as I am presented a dry-run for a conference at Argonne National Laboratory describing the transferring the Scantegrity system to an electronic system while retaining the voter verifiability properties; specifically using a smart phone, at Professor Vora's weekly Security Research Group meeting. Professor Rivest came to it, and I got to meet him.
The reason I mention it is that my project for senior design is creating an computer system for doing redistricting. Since senior design at GWU is pushed heavily towards the business side rather than the research side, I was until then leaning against actually implementing an automatic redistricting part, and was hoping to just allow people to draw them manually. However, Professor Vora had mentioned my project to Rivest, who it turns out finds the topic to be interesting. He offered to e-mail me some papers on the subject (and did), and to make a long story somewhat shorter, I'm now focusing my project entirely on automatic redistricting.
These two projects (and graduate school applications) are why I haven't been spending much time here lately, and why I probably won't be spending much time here in the near future.