On Sat, Jan 16, 1999 at 01:24:17PM +0000, Jim Dixon wrote:
[...]
> In 1999 there is no practical way to prove the identity of a person
> voting in a large-scale election over the Net.
Yes, but that is not *anywhere* near as important as it seems at
first.
In practical terms this same problem exists for a large-scale
international election conducted via postal-mail. The parameters are
slightly different, but there are many strong similarities. If I am
conducting a p-mail ballot, I don't have any scalable cost-effective
way of proving that a paper ballot supposedly from Jim Dixon in
England actually came from you, or somebody else.
There are actually two places where identity verification is done --
at voter registration time, and when the vote is actually cast.
The cost of identification at registration time is similar in both
cases -- potentially high -- whether the voting mechanism is done
through email or not. You identify the "administrative contact" for
the vote (speaking metaphorically) to a fairly high of confidence, so
that they can be contacted for later verification, should a problem
arise. In fact, whatever identification method you use for the
p-mail case could be used for the e-mail case -- of course, one would
specify an email voting address instead of a pmail one.
In either case the per ballot cost of ballot verification must be
kept low. Typically only a cursory per ballot validation is done,
with record keeping so that fraud can be detected if the election is
contested. If one is doing a roll-call vote, with publication of
the entire roll to every voter of record the possibility of fraud
becomes very slim.
So, while there are certainly some issues, there is no question that
a successful, fair, and efficient international election can be held
via email, and in fact, this can be considered a solved problem --
such voting systems are in production use, including (as the ISOC
example shows) election of officers of a Corporation.
I realize that you probably agree with this conclusion. I just
wanted to be sure that people didn't draw erroneous conclusions from
your statement.
I believe it is true that Nominet uses online voting, doesn't it?
--
Kent Crispin, PAB Chair "Do good, and you'll be
[EMAIL PROTECTED] lonesome." -- Mark Twain
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