Scientists question electronic voting

Bill Stewart bill.stewart at pobox.com
Sat Mar 8 16:24:41 EST 2003


Barney Wolff wrote:
 > This is a perfect example of what I'm complaining about:  You're holding
 > electronic voting to a much higher standard than you are paper ballots.

If it's going to replace paper ballots, it needs to offer advantages
that make up for its disadvantages, and if it gives us the opportunity to
make a significantly better system, might as well try to do that too.
The two main disadvantages of paper systems are slow speed and cost of 
counting.
Problems with speed are really problems with lack of patience :-)

But electronic systems have the major disadvantage that unless you have
some kind of independently auditable record created at the time of voting,
there's no way to tell that the system hasn't been set to cheat,
whereas most of the easy ways to cheat paper and lever-machine systems
are obvious, and can either be prevented by watching the materials
at the right times, or audited by counting the holes and hanging chads
and unused supplies afterwards.

The primary complaint everybody had with Florida's paper ballot system
was that the layout was confusing,
making it hard to tell if you were voting for Gore or Buchanan,
and any of you who've never seen a confusing layout on a computer interface
can let me know....

At 12:39 PM 03/08/2003 -0800, Ed Gerck wrote:
>Bill Stewart wrote:
> > No, legal authorization is only required to do so _legally_.
> > We're talking about different threat models here,
> > since we're talking about stuffing ballot-boxes and bribing people -
> > what does it take to get the information without getting caught?
> > Can it be traced in real time, or after the fact, or both,
> > and how much is the voter's cooperation required?
> > How long is the data stored after the election?
> > (For instance, if the election isn't close enough to be contested
> > within N days, do they burn all the ballots?)
>
>The UK is still a sovereign nation and, thus, they can choose to have
>an election system where the ability to verify eligibility to vote
>after the election trumps the voter's right to privacy, fraud
>possibilities notwithstanding. The US and other countries have
>a different model for public elections, where voter privacy is absolute.

Well, of course they can, if they want; they can also go back to
strange women lying in ponds distributing swords for all I care...
But the context of the discussion isn't whether the system will do
the things it's supposed to when nobody's trying to cheat,
and if they've got different rules, they've got different ways to cheat.

> > The two usual scenarios are
> > - Real-time: "Thank you for your receipt, here's your bottle of whiskey,
> >          and the Democratic Party invites you to vote again this 
> afternoon!"
>
>Not in the UK -- there is no Democratic party there ;-)

What's the traditional bribe for a vote in the UK?




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