Punchscan

Punchscan

Developer(s)	Richard Carback, David Chaum, Jeremy Clark, Aleks Essex, and Stefan Popoveniuc.
Stable release	1.0 (November 2, 2006) [±]
Preview release	1.5 (July 16, 2007) [±]
Written in	Java
Operating system	Cross-platform
Available in	English
Type	vote counting system
License	Revised BSD license
Website	http://punchscan.org/

Punchscan is an optical scan vote counting system invented by cryptographer David Chaum. Punchscan is designed to offer integrity, privacy, and transparency. The system is voter-verifiable, provides an end-to-end (E2E) audit mechanism, and issues a ballot receipt to each voter. The system won grand prize at the 2007 University Voting Systems Competition.

The computer software which Punchscan incorporates is open-source; the source code was released on 2 November 2006 under a revised BSD licence.^[1] However, Punchscan is software independent; it draws its security from cryptographic functions instead of relying on software security like DRE voting machines. For this reason, Punchscan can be run on closed source operating systems, like Microsoft Windows, and still maintain unconditional integrity.

The Punchscan team, with additional contributors, has since developed Scantegrity.