Perry I agree with you on all *except* that you are prejudiced against folks who are not mobile, have immobile dependants, are busy or agoraphobes. In-person voting doesn't resist graveyard voting much better than lining up the meat. One could say that in-person voting rewards those too lazy or careless with their time to request absentee status. Home voting is important to keep participation high. I believe 25% of the Calif governor votes were absentee. Participation is nominally a figure of merit for elections. And the voter authentication is the weakest I know of: to register you submit a name, signature, and address. To vote, you submit same. Nothing prevents graveyard registration except the law. Why is this relevent? Because you have to consider threat models. Spousal coercion & vote buying is one, well-addressed in this thread. So are tech-implementation and social-trust issues. Snipers or bombers at polling places is another, ignored because we're all modern westerners. Rain and immobility have only been touched on because most of us can drive and walk. Voting from home should be *encouraged* and it should use paper as the transport, not computers. (The paper being kept by the counters not the voters.) Which is how it should be at the in-person polls. Again, keeping tech away is good, fighting coercion is good, but don't argue against absentee voting. In fact, absentee voting (vs. tech in the polling booth) is a good *example* of how to keep things simple and resistant to many (eg tech-enabled) attacks. At 12:46 PM 4/9/04 -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
I'm especially scared about mechanisms that let people "vote at home" and such. Lots of people seem to think that the five minute trip to the polling place is what is preventing people from voting, and they want to let people vote from their computers. Lets ignore the question of whether it is important that the people who can't be bothered to spend ten minutes going to the polling place care enough about the election to be voting anyway. Lets also ignore the totally unimportant question of vote buying -- vote buying has happened plenty of times over the centuries without any need for the purchaser to verify that the vote was cast as promised. Tammany Hall did not need to watch people's votes to run a political machine.
I'm much more concerned that we may be automating the "graveyard" vote, which is currently kept in check by the need to personally appear at polling places. I'm also concerned about the forms of fraud I haven't even considered yet because no one has invented them yet. Election security isn't just about assuring that votes are correctly counted.