EIP Functional Requirements
EIP supports both the hand count of paper ballots and also the machine count of paper or electronic ballots. How that is accomplished is left to the provicer, but what it must do is specified here.
Hand Counts
A manual tally of votes (Hand Counts) only makes sense when using paper ballots. Under EIP, this can be accomplished using any hand count process with or without placing a VTN on the ballot.
Canonical Mode (business as usual) Most any hand count process works here as long as the process and the teller committee is concensus based.
Optimal Mode (Ledger Counting of HCPB Summaries) If a VTN is placed on every ballot and the totals of the ballots are entered into an EIP distributed ledger, these provide a reporting mechanism for the hand count process. The ballots themselves could also be scanned to retain images of the ballots if desired. The reason this mode is deemed optimal is that the voter could theoretically locate their ballot, but the system would also have to provide a mechanism to accomplish that.
Machine Counts
Using a machine running on a computer or device of any kind can process either paper or electronic ballots. This would require a VTN whether paper or electronic ballots are used.
Here’s how the EIP machine protocol works :
After clearing the voter rolls entirely and registering anew for each election, every election using (1) electronic ballots or (2) paper ballots with machine scans, and either one requiring a secret ballot must satisfy the following three requirements:
Provide a secret ballot by ensuring the separation of the vetted voter’s identity from their vote
Provide a mechanism for voters to verify their cast ballot
Provide a mechanism for each voter to count all the completed ballots.
The Bottom Line
Any electronic or partially electronic voting system that can satisfy these 3 requirements is EIP compliant, by definition.
The election integrity protocol prescribes a concrete way of satisfying these 3 EIP requirements. There may be other ways, and if the requirements can be satisfied using other means, then these other approaches are also EIP compliant, by definition.