voting

[David Jablon]

I think Ed's criticism is off-target.  Where is the "privacy problem" with
Chaum receipts when Ed and others still have the freedom to refuse
theirs or throw them away?

It seems a legitimate priority for a voting system to be designed to
assure voters that the system is working.  What I see in serious
voting system research efforts are attempts to build systems that
provide both accountability and privacy, with minimal tradeoffs.

If some kind of tradeoff between accountability and privacy is inevitable,
in an extreme scenario, I'd still prefer the option to make the tradeoff for
myself, rather than have the system automatically choose for me.

-- David


>> At 11:05 AM 4/9/04 -0400, Trei, Peter wrote:
>> ....
>> >1. The use of receipts which a voter takes from the voting place to 'verify'
>> >that their vote was correctly included in the total opens the way for voter
>> >coercion.

>John Kelsey wrote:
>> I think the VoteHere scheme and David Chaum's scheme both claim to solve
>> this problem.  The voting machine gives you a receipt that convinces you
>> (based on other information you get) that your vote was counted as cast,
>> but which doesn't leak any information at all about who you voted for to
>> anyone else.  Anyone can take that receipt, and prove to themselves that
>> your vote was counted (if it was) or was not counted (if it wasn't). 

At 06:58 PM 4/15/04 -0700, Ed Gerck wrote:
>The flaw in *both* cases is that it reduces the level of privacy protection
>currently provided by paper ballots.
>
>Currently, voter privacy is absolute in the US and does not depend
>even on the will of the courts. For example,  there is no way for a
>judge to assure that a voter under oath is telling the truth about how
>they voted, or not. This effectively protects the secrecy of the ballot
>and prevents coercion and intimidation in all cases.