First, much thanks to Howie Goodell for his reply. (Note that printing stuff on transparencies was proposed (by Shamir?) some time ago, perhaps for quorum-required info.) At 09:17 PM 10/31/03 -0600, Neil Johnson wrote:
On Friday 31 October 2003 12:10 pm, Major Variola (ret) wrote:
Is is possible to use blinding (or other protocols) so that all votes
are published, you can check that your vote is in there, and you (or anyone) can run the maths and verify the vote? Without being able to link people to votes without their consent.
Doing this would allow vote buyers to verify a voter voted the way they wanted.
One option might be to give the voter a MAC of their ballot and then
Yeah, so? I've voted from home for a decade. Nothing stops me from showing Vinny (Vinny the votebuyer, he's Eve's cousin on Mallory's side) my ballot before I mail it. Or registering my cat to vote. They are illegal, and detectable, that suffices. [Note to furriners: in the US you don't need "ID" to register or to vote, just a signature, and for that an X suffices.] Although I *do* agree with you --resistance to votebuying is a desirable feature if you can have it. (Insert cellphone-with-camera-in-voting-booth discussion here.) (And yes, voting at home is succeptible to spousal coercion. Better than queueing up with the sheeple! Which is also a form of *meteorological* coercion, folks don't go out in crappy weather. Also snipers and bombs, in places with that kind of weather, will deter centralized voting.) print the
MAC's in the paper. The voter could check to see if their vote had been
altered.
I still think far better methods for improving voter turn out other
Internet voting are: 1. A National Election Holiday (but in the middle of the work week so
That's a good idea. I don't think Chaum's transparency-printing scheme does this. Its also possible to write-in candidates for elections you don't care about as "tracers" to make sure your ballot (albeit not other votes in the same bundle) made it. I voted for Monica Lewinsky a few times that way. than people
can't use it to extend a vacation).
Too expensive.
2. Couple the Election with a National Lottery with local, state, and national prizes. With appropriate delink of voter's identity from the way they voted of course.
Well, lotteries are evil in my book, but they certainly do inspire the innumerate sheeple. I doubt it would work unless the "prizes" were huge --I only get DoS'ed by queues at 7-11s when the prizes orders of magnitude larger than 1e6.
(I'm not claiming that this would actually improve things overall, just
increase voter turnout).
Have a hollywood actor run. Or have recalls every year. Worked in Calif! On the other hand, perhaps it should be made harder to vote. Democracy is mob rule, after all. Testing citizens on the Bill of Rights would be a good start.