excerpt from: Did Your Vote Count? New Coded Ballots May Prove It Did By Sara Robinson, New York Times, March 2, 2004

... The "frog" voting system was proposed in a working paper released by the Caltech/M.I.T. Voting Technology Project in 2001. An all-electronic version of this approach - described by Dr. Rivest, Dr. Shuki Bruck of the California Institute of Technology and Dr. David Jefferson of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - would use two different types of electronic voting machines and a simple memory card, the frog.

Before the election, each voter would get a frog filled with all the candidates and other ballot options. Using the first type of electronic machine, which could be at an office or local supermarket, the voter would make his choices, and they would be stored on the frog.

The day of the election, the voter would go to his precinct and take the second step: inserting the frog into a secured "vote caster" machine. That machine would read the frog and display the voter's choices on the screen. If he was satisfied, the voter would push a button and cast his vote. The frog would then be "frozen," so that its data could no longer be altered, and deposited in a ballot box as a backup record.

The first type of voting machine could have audio functions and other features requiring elaborate software. Because its output would be checked by the vote caster, it would not need to be secure. The vote caster would require heavy security, but such a machine could be made so simple, the researchers say, that securing it would be feasible.

With frogs, as with a voter-verified paper trail (VVPAT), voters would still have to trust people to secure the counting process. mathematical voting systems - developed independently by Dr. Neff and Dr. David Chaum, an independent cryptographer and privacy expert - would ensure that votes were correctly counted, even in the presence of untrustworthy machines and officials.
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Emanuele Lombardi opinion: I don't think all that really solve any problem.

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excerpt from:
Ballot Boxes Go High Tech: From touch screens to digital 'frogs,' technology to make voting more secure is tricky, but it's coming
By Steven Levy, Newsweek, March 29 2004

... In 1999 a trio of computer scientists suggested a different method. It involves a doodad called a frog, for no particular reason other than that the term has no association with elections. A frog in this sense is a cheap form of digital storage that records votes. It might be a business-card-size piece of plastic with a bit of digital memory. After proving you're eligible to vote, you get a frog from an election official, who initializes it with the ballot appropriate to your precinct. (Bonus: there's no reason you can't get your home ballot if you're at some other location. It's possible to store information on a single CD that could generate any ballot in the country.) If you like, you could get the frog well in advance of Election Day, and use any computer you like to enter the votes. On Election Day itself, you take your frog into the booth and insert it into the official voting terminal, which reads the frog's content and displays your choices on the screen.

Then comes an "Is that your final answer?" moment: if you're happy with the selection, you press a button to make your vote official. If for some reason the readout did not reflect your choice, or you change your mind, you can reprogram the frog. (This ability to alter the frog means that no one can give you a preprogrammed frog with the assurance that you'll stick with the choices.) After the vote is formally cast, the frog, well, croaks - the memory freezes, and the device takes no changes. You'll leave it behind in case a recount is necessary, but it couldn't be used to revote. Though no one has yet identified many warts in the system, the frog idea seems like a long shot. "It's an attractive method, but no one's picked up on it yet," says co-inventor David Jefferson.
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Emanuele Lombardi opinion: Again, I don't think all that really solve any problem.