Don’t try hacking votes in the Swiss canton of Geneva. According to an AP article, the level of technology being used to encrypt votes there is so advanced that if someone successfully hacks into the voting system, “it will explode like a soap bubble,” according to the physics professor who helped come up with the technology.

How does it work? “A computer in Geneva, provided by the company id Quantique, will fire photons, or particles of light, down a fiber-optic link to a receiver 62 miles away,” the AP reports. Here’s what the Geneva State Chancellor had to say (via Slashdot):

We would like to provide optimal security conditions for the work of counting the ballots. In this context, the value added by quantum cryptography concerns not so much protection from outside attempts to interfere as the ability to verify that the data have not been corrupted in transit between entry and storage.

I’m hoping the folks at WIRED Threat Level have something to say about this. Not sure what kind of voting machines they use in Geneva. Let me know if you have any idea.

Meanwhile, back in the USA… the Department of Justice has been accused of voter disenfranchisement.

Photo of soap bubble by Philipp Bunge via Flickr

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