CDR: Re: A secure voting protocol

[Ken Brown]

Bill Stewart wrote:
> 
> 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 :-)

Neither George Bush nor Al Gore are actually standing for election in
Boca Raton. But there will be a rag-bag of supervisors and commissioners
and representatives and city and county and state officials of various
sorts. And these people can appoint agents to stand in for them at the
polls. 
 
> 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.

Exactly.
 
> The difficult problems are making sure that the ballot box wasn't stuffed,

Reasonably easy as long as it is in the open and sealed at all times.
People go in and out of the polling station all the time. And there will
be more than one official present. Again candidates and their agents
(local councillors, people like that) can (in this country) be present
at polling stations & they see people going in and out and can talk to
the officials (I've often done this - it can be very boring). That makes
it risky to do the stuffing. 

Where stuffing is easy is where the local political establishment is
entirely controlled by one party or faction. If the officials at the
polling stations & the police & the people doing th ecoutn are all on
the same side then a lot of the openness is lost of course. But the
chances are that those will be just the sort of places where votes won't
be close.

> and that the people who voted all existed and were unique,

That's the hard part. Do you have to give id to vote? Here we don't, so
impersonation is possible. Rare I think (doing it enough times to
influence a nationwide, or even a city or county -wide election would be
risky) although it is rumoured to be traditional in parts of Northern
Ireland - from where it was rumoured to have been exported to parts of
north America :-)

I have to confesss that I  am fascinated with the mechanisms of
elections - well, I suppose some people are train spotters. 

Ken