On Sat, Dec 18, 2010 at 10:26:21PM +0530, Pranesh Prakash wrote: > 1. Not all EVMs are created equal, and each design must be evaluated on > its own merit.
No, electronic voting is dead for fundamental reasons. It doesn't matter how secure or insecure the architecture is. Read what Schneier has to say about it. He's usually right on the money. > 2. The problems with EVMs should not be evaluated on their own, but > compared to those with paper ballots. This might not be very important Paper is self-documenting. It creates its own documentation trail. Paper is offline, so it can't be scrambled. Paper is distributed over multiple independant physically securable compartments. People understand sealed urns, counting, locks, guards. Paper can be trusted to be fully inspectable to uninstrumented humans. Paper can be counted independently by mutually distrusting observers. Paper is physical, and is subject to the usual safety protocols. People understand protocols and processes for physical objects. It is possible to combine electronical and paper-based methods, to combine the advantages (e.g. by allowing voter receipts which cannot be used as proof to third parties, but can be used to validate a fishy result after the fact). No such option for electrons. > in "developed" countries (though the infamous Hanging Chads of Florida Paper isn't fool-proof. However, hanging chads is one of the cases where the problem is discovered by inspection and is understood by anyone. Many established paper-based methods are easy, and fool-proof. Don't fix what isn't broken. > could be used to argue against that), but in many developed countries > where problems like ballot-stuff, booth-capturing, etc., are rampant, You cannot fix systemic problems with hardware. You need to get as many people from the opposition monitoring the collection, counting and reporting up the chain. > the cracks against EVMs *might* (depending on the design of the EVM) be How do you even know an attack has occured? People don't understand cryptographic protocols, and attacks against such, which are completely transparent to nonexperts. It is not obvious to a nonexpert who is an expert and not, so why not eliminate that problem right from the start. > more difficult to carry out than against paper ballots. The more I know about computers, the less I trust computers. Don't allow electronic voting machines, if you don't want your votes to be stolen, even without anyone being the wiser. Just don't. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
