Guardian: electronic voting by 2006

[Richard Clayton]

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In article <E17UlTr-0005N0-00@wisbech.cl.cam.ac.uk>, Ross Anderson
<Ross.Anderson@cl.cam.ac.uk> writes

>In an article in today's Guardian
>
>   http://www.guardian.co.uk/internetnews/story/0,7369,756668,00.html
>
>Robin Cook floats the idea of making the next general election fully
>electronic.

It's probably worth recording Matt Blaze's comment (Google won't give me
a definitive cite for it) to the effect that he didn't know when the
first large scale electronic election would occur, but he was absolutely
certain that the one after that would be 'manual'.

>For interest, I chaired a session on electronic voting at the ACSAC
>conference in New Orleans in December 2000 while the Florida business
>was in full swing. The strong consensus among the assembled security
>professionals was that we didn't trust e-voting to be an improvement.

that's more positive than one might expect (or an understatement for
effect)... I'd expect sufficiently widespread systems failure to bring
the process into disrepute and it would only be novelty (a transient
aspect of "obscurity") that prevented significant fraud :-(

- -- 
richard                                              Richard Clayton

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.         Benjamin Franklin

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