On Sat, Apr 15, 2006 at 08:12:19AM -0400, Tim Schmidt wrote:
> All excellent information, and well reasoned.
>
> However, I take issue with the 100% requirement for paper ballots.
If you want to take issue, you'd have to do it with the NH
legislature. The Governor signed the bill last week, and it's law now.
> It is concievable that PKI infrastructure be used for a verifiable
> electronic-only voting system... Assuming every citizen had their own
> key pair.
That would make each ballot traceable to the voter who cast it, and
do away with the secret ballot. I think. I'm not really a specialist in
computer security, but I do understand the critical political importance of
the secret ballot, and would insist on preserving that.
> The situation would be analagous to GPG-encrypted e-mail... albeit
> with truckloads of extra security measures (some regulatory, some
> electronic).
>
> I'm not saying it would be easy... just possible.
>
> --tim
It would also be orders of magnitude more expensive, since it
substitutes a pile of hardware and software for a 50-cent felt tip marker.
The real principle here is that the paper ballot guarantees that
nothing can come between the recorded vote and the voter's eyeball. It's
the ultimate tamperproof system. There is no way to lie to the voter about
exactly what was recorded.
The other thing the paper ballot does is leave a durable and
authoritative record of the election, for anyone who wants to question the
official count, and pay for a recount or appeal the election officials'
certified returns -- all of which are provided for in NH law. The
hand-marked paper ballot provides the fundamental infrastructure to make the
electoral process fault-tolerant.
And that moves the equipment design problem on to the counting
phase, where there really is an economic incentive to solve all the
regulatory and technical problems involved in designing a machine that the
public can trust. Openness in every part of the design is a key part of
that. I think the contribution volunteers can make is not to do the actual
design, because that needs to be under extremely rigid discipline, but to
criticize it and file comments with the ECO board.
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