CDR: Re: A secure voting protocol

[Tim May]

At 6:42 PM +0000 11/13/00, Ken Brown wrote:
>Augusto Jun Devegili replied to Tim May:
>
>
>>  > It won't happen in our lifetimes. It may happen in European nations,
>>  > but only because the average citizen does what he is told to do more
>>  > so than American paranoids and individualists will do.
>>
>>  [Augusto] I would like to see this happening after the scientific/academic
>>  community approves a secure protocol and its implementation architecture.
>>  And I also understand that it will be quite hard to convince the general
>>  voter of the security of e-voting.
>
>I think I have to agree with Tim here. That blind-sign-sign-blind-vote
>protocol might be wonderful but is not going to be accepted by the
>average voter. Or even the brainiest.

I saw a good piece on one of the networks about why "voting at your 
home PC" is not a good idea for _other_ reasons. To wit, families 
kibitzing about the vote. Or watching while the wife or husband votes 
properly. Or even people literally buying votes and then watching 
while their bought votes are voted the right way.

None of these things is even fractionally as possible with the 
"secure voting booth" protocol we have today, where only one person 
is in a booth at any given time.

The wife whose husband has said he'll beat the shit out of her if she 
doesn't vote for Bush can vote for whomever she wishes and know that 
no one will know how she voted.

A "vote at home" protocol is vulnerable to all sorts of mischief that 
has nothing to do with hackers intercepting the vote, blah blah.

--Tim May
-- 
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Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
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