On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 12:39:39PM +0300, Zacharia Gichiriri wrote: > I think the subject of the discussion should be: How can we make e-voting > more secure and credible?
Answer: don't use it. Period, full stop, end of discussion. Any suggestion that e-voting can be made secure is delusional. Simple paper-based systems can be manipulated as well (study the colorful history of elections in Chicago) but (a) it's much harder to pull off with the kind of precision required to avoid making it obvious (b) it doesn't scale nearly as well (c) it requires a relatively large conspiracy (d) which means many people (e) which means a high probability someone will screw up and (f) and even if they don't, someone will probably talk about it. Also (g) these attacks are very well-known and well-understood, which means (h) so are the defenses against them and (i) these attacks/defenses are relatively symmetrical, which means defenders have a good chance -- unlike in e-voting, where attackers have a many-orders-of-magnitude advantage. You can have something vaguely resembling democracy [1] or you can have e-voting. Choose one. ---rsk [1] I chose that phrase deliberately. We're talking here about voting systems, in the general sense of that term. We're not talking about the larger question of the overall electoral process, which of course we all know is frequently manipulated from within (e.g., gerrymandering, specious "voter ID" laws, polling locations, hours, equipment, and staffing, etc.) and now we know is also manipulated from without (e.g., Russian tampering with the recent US election). These are not technological problems per se, however, and neither are their solutions. -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu.
