CDR: Re: A secure voting protocol

[Bill Stewart]

At 06:42 PM 11/13/00 +0000, Ken Brown wrote:
>And us non-individualistic Brits are so non-paranoid that we still won't
>accept voting machines or mechanical counting. All done by crosses on
>the paper, counted by hand, with the candidates in the room watching the
>counters. 

That's nice and trustable.  Neither George Bush nor Al Gore
has the time to watch 100,000,000 ballots counted,
though one could argue that we'd be better off if they couldn't
take office until they'd sat down together and done it,
or until one of them had conceded that the other was more patient :-)

Even counting all the ballots in a large city has to be parallelized.
Of course, political parties are often good at that,
at least parties big enough to be successfully elected.

>Which is the best defence against fraud. Everything is
>literally out in the open, on big tables, with the candidates there, and
>paranoid card-player rules - all boxes sealed at the polling station and
>opened again at the count before witnesses, no-one except the counters &
>Returning Officer (a sort of election supervisor) to physically touch
>the ballots,  no hands under the table, the counters can't even wear
>jackets in some places. It works.

The difficult problems are making sure that the ballot box wasn't stuffed,
and that the people who voted all existed and were unique,
and that their votes weren't obtained through bribery (though deception is
fine :-)
Here in the US, it's traditional that ballot boxes (where they're used)
are sealed at the polling place and ostensibly only opened with witnesses,
but fraud is nonetheless possible and perhaps still practiced on a small
scale.

				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart at pobox.com
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