David Honig wrote:
> >First of all, that's not "privacy", that's "anonymity".
> >
> >We have voter registration precisely so that we know who the voters
> >are! We are not changing voter registration....
> >
> > Ed Gerck wrote:
> >> 4. Fail-safe privacy in universal verifiability. If the
> >> encrypted ballots are successfully attacked, even with
> >> court order, the voter’s name must not be revealed. In
>
> On Keeping Votes Secret
>
> If you give people a paper receipt with their votes on it
> (as WAS's scheme mentions) then their votes can be bought or blackmailed.
> Now, this may be an acceptable *tradeoff* (trust gained from paper trail
> vs. increased succeptability to coercion), that's not for me to decide.
The law does not allow it, and for good reasons as you mention. Also, proposals
to print the vote usually advance it as the "silver bullet" solution. This is a
fatal mistake because to increase realibility in communications it is much better to
have a number of independent channels than one "strong" channel (Shannon,
tenth theorem).
> One potential solution is to make the 'receipts' readily forgable --something
> anyone could print up at home, on ordinary commercial blank paper. Such
> ready counterfeiting would deter vote buying and blackmail.
Not really. The buyer might be waiting outside the precinct, the seller might not
be able to fake it (technically -- think about the "digital divide" issues just to
have a computer), the election official might also get in collusion, etc.
> On Banning Video Cameras From Voting Places
>
> The voting apparatus may keep a serial record of each vote, in order, for
> auditing purposes.
No, it MUST not. See the FEC standards on voting. The FEC standards also
demand "storage alocation scrambling" in order to avoid even a serial order
of storage.
> This is also mentioned in WAS's legislative text.
which is a miconception, albeit a common one
> Now,
> if an evil vote buyer had someone recording who entered which booth
> and also had access to the audit records, the correlation lets them
> buy or blackmail votes. Note that this requires only *one* conspirator if
> that conspirator is a poll worker with a concealed camera.
Yes, this is one of the reasons. It could also be the election official.
Cheers,
Ed Gerck
