Message: 7 Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2003 09:43:18 -0500 From: Rob Speer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
If you have the option of verifying your ballot, then someone has the option of paying you $20 for your verifiable vote receipt. Or threatening you if you don't get a receipt and give it to them.
Actually, there's a trivial way to avoid the problem of 'coerced ballots', even with plaintext receipts. All you need is "easily forged receipts." You could even have a "sample machine" set up in the same room, where users could 'test' their voting, and get a fake (but indistinguishable) receipt. The electronic display (and booth signage) should clearly indicate that this is a sample, but the receipt should be indistinguishable from a legitimate one. A coercer would have no way of telling the difference.
Of course, you could make it even easier and just have all receipts be done in a commonly-used font on standard letter sized paper, and anyone could trivially make (or sell) false receipts.
True, that wouldn't stop a gangster who was able to stand in the voting area and grab your receipt the moment you finished voting, but anyone with that level of access could just stand in the voting booth with you.
There's also something to be said for not over-optimizing for the corner cases. At least in the vast majority of precincts in the U.S., active coercion is quite rare. We should design to avoid the most common problems, as long as there was some way to address the edge cases with more effort.
Of course, in other countries I imagine it would be quite different. But I think the more important question is whether we can reach consensus about -what- information should be available to -whom-. If we can agree on that social question, the technical problems should be simple to resolve.
-- Ernie P.
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