On Sat, 16 Jan 1999, Kent Crispin wrote:
> > Things would move much closer to practicality if rather than tying
> > votes to the elusive individual you tied them to either domain names
> > or IP address space.
>
> The most straightforward thing is to tie them to an email address at
> registration time. When the voter is identified at registration,
> they must supply an email address as their voting address -- in
> fact, registration is essentially the process of binding an
> individual or an organization to an email address.
>
> While some email headers can be spoofed easily, it is actually very
> difficult to create a really good forgery, with complete delivery
> information. And a public rollcall vote, with every vote posted on a
> public web, would be extremely resistant to voter fraud -- easily as
> strong as a physical mail based system
I think that we have different scales in mind.
In actual fact, for anyone with reasonable resources (like a sovereign
government, for example), forging massive numbers of votes is easy.
And, as you must know, creating email accounts is trivial.
If I run the Bristol telephone book through a scanner and generate
500,000 or so email addresses, how to you propose to decide which
email address is "real" and which isn't?
Another example: Freeserve, a new UK ISP, has signed up a million
or so subscribers in the last few months. [Apologies to Freeserve,
this is just an example! no offense intended...] Let's say that
they chose to sign up their entire subscriber base. It would be
trivial for them to forge subscriptions from all of them and then
intercept all relevant correspondence coming back to these
subscribers. The headers and all would be perfect. Focus on the
principles, please: how do we prevent this sort of mass forgery?
Sure, it would become obvious fairly quickly if Freeserve did this.
What if the North Korean government or some other totalitarian
state decided to take over ICANN with this sort of mechanism? How
would you prove what was going on?
> > Given the fact that anyone can have as many
> > domain names as they are willing to pay for, it would make more sense
> > to tie the vote to registered IP address space. This very roughly
> > corresponds to the method used in generating the UK electoral roll,
> > and has many of the same advantages. The IP address space is finite
> > and at least the newer blocks allocated through the RIRs are tracked
> > very carefully, so that there is an audit trail leading back from an
> > IP address to whoever is responsible for the address block.
>
> Oh -- are you looking for some kind of automatic binding of the form
> "every individual who 'owns' an IP address gets a vote"?
No, I am trying to arrive at a simple scheme for identifying real
people at reasonable cost, one that scales up to the size of the
Internet. And at the same time I am trying to tie the right to
vote to some minimal understanding of the Internet.
If we say "one vote per email address", then the cost of forging names
hovers around zero.
If we say "one vote per registrant", then the cost of acquiring a vote
for an imaginary person is $70 at NSI.
Limiting votes to people who are the admin contacts for IP blocks makes
it considerably more difficult to acquire a vote. Also, such people are
likely to have a real interest in the Internet. And the process of
acquiring address space from one of the RIRs is sufficiently fuzzy to
make it difficult to automate.
> > However, ISPA UK uses electronic voting. We hold elections over the
> > Net using single transferable voting (STV). We announce elections
> > by broadcast to the membership. Members vote through a Web page.
> > When a vote is cast we email the registered voter, verifying the vote
> > as we understand it and giving him or her the chance to complain if
> > there is an error. We also publish an up-to-date version of the vote
> > on the Web as voting proceeds, listing each voter and how they have
> > voted.
>
> Is that software available?
Sure. As it is, the software is modified by hand for each election (by
me), but it would not be difficult to make it table driven. However,
it's Perl code; this and other factors limit its scaleability. My guess
is that it could be modified to handle elections with say 10,000 voters.
Above that I would redesign the software and rewrite it in C.
> > In consequence there is little chance for fraud. What we have found,
> > however, is that voting is so easy that we have a problem with apathy.
> >
> > Before people had to take the day off work and go down to London to
> > vote. Now they just use their browsers. Oddly enough, the voter
> > turnout has fallen, and the degree to which elections involve the same
> > old people has risen. Oh well ... #-}
>
> Once people learn how truly boring all the ICANN stuff is going to
> be I expect interest to dwindle dramatically.
With that I am in the most whole-hearted agreement.
--
Jim Dixon Managing Director
VBCnet GB Ltd http://www.vbc.net tel +44 117 929 1316
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Member of Council Telecommunications Director
Internet Services Providers Association EuroISPA EEIG
http://www.ispa.org.uk http://www.euroispa.org
tel +44 171 976 0679 tel +32 2 503 22 65
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