"Arnold G. Reinhold" wrote:
> 7. The voting process should be simple enough to be used by people
> with minimal education and should in no way discourage legitimate
> voting.
That gets a bit political. Some would argue voting should not be so
simple (I had heard Isaac Asimov wanted voters to be able to pass some
basic intelligence test, such as factoring a simple polynomial, in order
to vote.*
> 8. (At least in the U.S.) The voting system should not require a
> national ID card or the equivalent.
That's a whole other issue. The registration process is a problem in
and of itself. Actually, it the generic bootstrapping problem in all
security models, how do you prove someone's identity?
> One notion that people seem to be missing in this discussion is that
> voting procedures in the US generally assume the existence of
> political parties and that the parties have both an interest and the
> means to supervise the elections. The primary security comes from
> allowing representatives of each party to observe every stage in the
> process.
Not true. Usually only the two major parties supervise elections,
clearly not unbiased when minor parties are involved.
> I also vote in Cambridge. The role of the "little old ladies" is to
> insure that no registered name is voted twice and to call out the
> name of each voter so that the poll watchers can verify their
> identity if they wish. I have never been asked for an ID of any sort.
Must be different polling stations.
> The ballots are guarded throughout the process, making such a
> correlation difficult
> Again a number of people are watching the polling place at all times
> The boxes are guarded throughout the process.
Yes, yes. I'm not saying I can defeat the process at will. However the
current system is very susceptible to force and or corruption. My point
was that people hold electronic voting to a much higher standard than
they do with physical elections. (Not that the higher standard is bad,
I think its great, now we just need to revisit the present system. :-)
Is this justified? Maybe. As you point out the strength of the system
relies on the fact that it is so massively distributed, the cost benefit
of compromising a polling station is not worthwhile (I'm assuming large
elections, and not local ones, where maybe only 5 polling stations are
used in the election). With computers, everything can be automated
including attacks and corruption, possibly making the distribution
effectively smaller. OTOH, it also means every computer can be a voting
booth, and instead of 10,000 polling stations across the US (I'm
guessing at this number), you can make 10,000,000.
--Mark
*There's another sticky issue of design. Hear you can easily (ignoring,
for the moment, FEC and state regulations and approvals) create one or
more formats for ballots, and, indeed, the process in general. However,
the very design/layout of the ballot effect voters. There are issues or
roll-off (less voting for elections further down on the ballot), name
ordering, information included on the ballot, and even how many steps
are required in voting (letting voters block vote for a party
counteracts the roll-off effect).
Really, there are a lot of social issues in elections, too. Cryptography
can provide solutions, but as to whether or not those solutions should
be employed is a different matter.
