Secretary of State Kevin Shelley is expected to announce today that as of 2006, all electronic voting machines in California must be able to produce a paper printout that voters can check to make sure their votes are properly recorded. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-shelley21nov21,1,847438.story?coll=l...
On Nov 21, 2003, at 8:16 AM, Major Variola (ret.) wrote:
Without the ability to (untraceably, unlinkably, of course) verify that this vote is "in the vote total," and that no votes other than those who actually voted, are in the vote total, this is all meaningless. I could rig a simple hack where a voter submits his ballot, which drops into a shredder even as a little printer is printing out his "proof" that he voted and that his vote was "accepted." It's blather to satisfy the sheeple. Besides, I expect what will happen is that an electronic voting system will be deployed and will be shut down by someone claiming a patent was issued to them "for the idea of electronic voting." Until Diebold pays off the Patent Office and the earlier idea is reviewed and found lacking. Face it, we are about to become an electronic kleptocracy. (There will also be some good hacks to scare the inner city welfare mutants into thinking the electronic machines will either track their votes, making them more likely to vote for the Establishment, or will steal their souls. I sense great possibilities here for disinformation.) --Tim May
On Nov 21, 2003, at 10:12 AM, Roy M. Silvernail wrote:
The point being that this "electronic voting" is just "syntactic sugar," superficial glitter. None of the interesting and robust foundations from crypto are being used. (Not that I am necessarily advocating this.) For the next ten years there will be endless babble on television about "the revolution of electronic voting," when in fact it's just a g-job to give voting machine companies some new business. --Tim May
At 9:19 AM -0800 11/21/03, Tim May wrote:
David Chaum has described a system where each voter gets a piece of paper which includes their vote, encrypted so they can't prove how they voted. The images of these pieces of paper are also posted on a web page, so the voters can look up their encrypted ballots to verify that their votes are being counted. These votes are passed through a number of mixes, which may be run by different organizations before they are completely decrypted and counted. (The mixes prevent a decrypted ballot from being associated with an input, encrypted ballot.) The encryption of the ballots is performed by over-printing the plain-text ballots, so the voter can verify the ballot's correctness before it is encrypted. The mixes are verified by random inspection. This system seems to meet the above requirements. Now, I can think of some ways to cheat with this system, but they are all a lot more likely to be found than cheats with the current systems. The big knock on all-electronic voting machines is that they are a step backwards in independent verification and audit from paper ballots, or even punch cards. (Yes, you can argue about hanging chad, pregnant chad, dimpled chad etc., but at least you have something tangible that represents each ballot.) The saving grace of the old mechanical voting machines is that they are mechanical, and hard to modify for cheating. Most anyone on this list can imagine the program in an electronic voting machine being different from the one that was audited and approved. That's hard to do with a mechanical system. We have seen failures where the mechanical systems lost all the votes made on them however, a failure that seems possible with the electronic systems as well. IMHO, the problem with Chaum's systems is that it is complex. I think that saving a printed paper ballot, along with the electronic totals, gives much the same level of security and assurance, with a system that the average voter can understand. Cheers - Bill ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Frantz | "There's nothing so clear as a | Periwinkle (408)356-8506 | vague idea you haven't written | 16345 Englewood Ave www.pwpconsult.com | down yet." -- Dean Tribble | Los Gatos, CA 95032
On Nov 24, 2003, at 9:51 AM, cubic-dog wrote:
But it will allow unions to enforce compliance in the collective union vote. And wives can "hold out" unless hubby produces the proof that he vote for the feminista-approved candidate. Voting receipts really open up the democratic process. Of course, for those who think the problem with the West is too much democracy, not a good thing. --Tim May
participants (6)
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Bill Frantz -
cubic-dog -
Dave Howe -
Major Variola (ret.) -
Roy M. Silvernail -
Tim May