At 02:07 PM 3/1/2006, Jobst Heitzig wrote: >Dear Abd ul-Rahman! > >> ... Is this possible without the use of > >> advanced technology like, say, public key cryptography? > >To which you replied: > > Yes. It's called secret ballot, and it is standard process. > >Perhaps I'm dumb, but could you please explain how that works? > >Just to be sure, let me state more precisely what I think is a necessary >degree of secrecy: *Nobody* but me must know whether I voted, what I >voted, whether I named a proxy, and who the proxy is. I don't see how >this can be done in an easy way!
All of this is easy and standard in elections. I'm just surprised that you haven't realized it, there must be some kind of brain fault.... happens to everyone. Here is an example of how it is done: You walk into a room and verify your identity with a clerk. The clerk hands you a ballot, an envelope, and a pencil. You take this into a curtained booth, and mark the ballot (or don't mark it), however you wish, privately. You then put it into the envelope, walk back to the clerk and hand it in. The clerk, in your presence, puts the ballot into a locked box. There will often be a police guard to prevent theft of the box or any attempt to inspect the ballots outside of official process. The only flaw in the security is that officials with access to the list of those who voted will know that you received a ballot. They will have no idea how you marked it, or, indeed, if you marked it at all. In some places the list of who voted is public record. Now, it is theoretically possible to compromise this system, but let me say that there are many kinds of election fraud in the U.S., but I have *never* heard of the secrecy of a ballot being compromised. While it is possible, it would also be difficult and there would be substantial risks (and it would be highly illegal, so the value of doing it would have to be great). In the end, with all that effort, all you have done is figure out how someone voted, and then, to use this information, you would have to take further and very substantial risks. For what? To have a significant effect, you would have to do all this on a large scale, intimidating many people. And that is *highly* visible, and you would be continually creating motivated enemies. No, it is much simpler to stuff the ballot boxes, mar the ballots to invalidate them (which can be done during the counting process in spite of significant precautions, there are some allegations that it happened in Florida 2000), interfere with the process in other ways, including "accidentally" removing from the voter rolls people who are legally qualified to vote but who demographically are likely to vote as you don't like. (Again, Florida 2000 and the African-American vote, with perhaps thousands of illegally disqualified voters. What are they going to do, appeal? And if they win the appeal, the election will not be redone. It is actually moot until the next election. They got away with it. Piercing the veil of voting secrecy, quite simply, is probably the most expensive and risky method of fraudulently manipulating elections. The only aspect of it that can succeed is intimidation directed against voting itself, which happens in unsettled jurisdictions like Iraq or Afghanistan. And where absentee ballots are allowed (as they are in the U.S. and many other places), this too becomes quite difficult. What are you going to do, watch everybody every minute of every day? Here, you can obtain absentee ballots through the mail. Under unsettled conditions, where there is some possibiity of retaliation for merely registering to vote, I would imagine that voter rolls themselves would be considered highly secret. If you are a member of a *highly* rejected group, there might be enough of society aligned against you to succeed in compromising your secrecy; but in that case, you would simply be better off voting since your vote isn't going to accomplish anything anyway. (Unless there is something like Asset Voting, where every vote *does* count.) ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
