On 4/15/06, Jack Carroll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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.
Not necessarily... I mean, some form of ID may or may not be associated with the key, but it need not trace back to an individuals real ID. For instance, as of today, I must present a valid ID to vote. There's nothing stopping a voting station from checking my ID(s) and giving me a temporary key. So long as the key lasts for as long as paper ballots would have been kept or longer, there's little compromise. > 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. Possibly. You're still talking about expensive counting machines anyway, so a few voting terminals in place of each counting machine shouldn't cost much more (voting machine ostensibly have few moving parts, which increase TCO dramatically). Not to mention that we wouldn't need ballots printed for each and every election. > 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. Agreed. I think, however, that the paper ballot is probably not the only system in the universe that could guarantee such a thing. > 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. Well... it allows a few people to do so. Remember we're in ultra-paranoid security mode here, and nothing beats massive peer review. Someone else counting my ballot miles away behind closed doors doesn't sound like that to me. Now, I'm not trying to put your state down. I'm sure you have plenty of safeguards. I just think it would be nice to be able to count cryptographically secure votes myself, along with every other voter, at home. And I should repeat... I'm not talking about some system I've designed in my basement... I'm speaking in hypotheticals here. It may be damn-near impossible to do this, but damn-near impossible isn't impossible. > 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. So, forgive me if I play the devil's advocate here, what is to stop someone inserting ballots in their favor before the counting phase? --tim _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
