Guardian: electronic voting by 2006

[Richard Clayton]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

In article <E17Uv3B-0000PO-00@wisbech.cl.cam.ac.uk>, Markus Kuhn
<Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk> writes

>Why should a manual election be in any way more reliable or easy to
>verify by the public, 

You look at the piles of votes on the counting tables (and how many get
tipped out of each ballot box) ... pretty hard to add 5000 extra votes
for one candidate without a large amount of collusion; and if someone
dumps a few blocks of 100 into the wrong pile a check will spot that the
error has occurred

even the candidates understand, so it must be simple :)

>if the electoral registry on which the election is
>based remains a low-quality, easily manipulated and difficult to
>independently verify dataset? 

In the UK the register is self-verified at the micro level (nip down to
the local library or council offices to see if you're in it) and
verified at the macro level by local party workers who'd notice if whole
streets had been missed off (they tend to have their own databases these
days for canvassing and will be updating them to match)

One of the recent changes has been to produce a rolling register so that
you don't get the distortions caused by using a database that could be
over a year out of date.

>Those now in charge of reviewing the US
>election procedures ...

The US and UK systems don't have a great deal in common -- and my
impression of a key difference is that the lack of centralisation in the
UK gives a great deal of resilience to the system - corruption would
have to be very widespread to be effective.

Perhaps a test for electronic voting systems to meet is that we should
have several hundred different implementations, so that there's no
single pressure point.

- -- 
richard @ highwayman . com                       "Nothing seems the same
                          Still you never see the change from day to day
                                And no-one notices the customs slip away"

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGPsdk version 1.7.1

iQA/AwUBPTXxPxfnRQV/feRLEQI1nACgoSYagHL4335OcGDG624BLmv5vxYAoPya
spbb2042A+QJ2RefmKrcEwhC
=c4g0
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----