Guardian: electronic voting by 2006

[Matthew Byng-Maddick]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 04:55:01PM +0100, David Hansen wrote:
> It would seem perfectly possible to design a secret ballot using 
> computers. However, the chances of such a system being designed are 
> next to zero. Even organisations like the Electroral Reform Society 
> seem addicted to numbering ballot papers, judging by the ones I have 
> spotted in votes they have conducted. The chances of the Home Office 
> allowing a secret ballot to be set up are undoubtedly zero. They 
> would claim that terrorists could use it to murder small children.

The secret ballot is the effort involved in connecting the numbers with
a piece of paper.

It has been conjectured (and various papers published on the subject) that
it is impossible to design a truely secret (under the definitions that you
would like) ballot system which is resistant to electoral fraud.

I'd certainly like to not see the current US situation where an electoral
fraud has probably been propagated, but noone really knows because of the
stupidity of their electronic voting. If everything is kept as paper, then
finding out how given people voted is time consuming and hard, and of
course, it's relatively easy to destroy while knowing that there's unlikely
to be a backup (one match ought to do it). This is not true with a computer
searching high-quality digital data.

MBM

-- 
Matthew Byng-Maddick         <mbm@colondot.net>           http://colondot.net/