Anyone know more about this BT "uk identity verification" scheme?

[Brian Beesley]

On Tuesday 18 March 2003 23:48, Adrian Midgley wrote:

> Had interesting ideas there about elections - by petition of a
> sufficient number of voters, thos voters whose candidate was not
> sucessful in accumulating the required number being free to move
> their vote to someone else, thus tending toward every vote being
> successfully reflected in an elected representative, and no
> voter being unrepresented or without a member of parliament for
> whom he had voted.

Um. Sounds a lot like the STV PR system we've had in Northern Ireland for 
some time. In practise there have been some problems (apart from widespread 
vote-rigging which goes with the turf):

(1) STV multiple-seat selections take _ages_ to count. IIRC the last Euro 
election in NI took a couple of days longer than any other count in the UK, 
and it wasn't even a close contest.

(2) The idea behind introducing this system in NI was to reduce polarization, 
the idea being that those voting #1 for "extreme" candidates would use their 
subsequent preferences to vote for moderate candidates of the same general 
persuasion. This idea seems to have backfired; what seems to be happenning 
recently is that moderate voters are using later preferences to elect extreme 
candidates of the same general persuasion, rather than moderate candidates of 
a different persuasion. Hence the rise of Sinn Fein at the expense of SDLP 
(remember them?), the rise of the DUP, the virtual elimination of the (mildly 
Unionist) Alliance party and the trouble that David Trimble now finds himself 
in.

In any case the system still fails to achieve proper representation of 
minorities. In my local council ward (electing 5 seats) the Nationalist vote 
would be around 16% yet it's pretty well guaranteed that the 5 elected 
candidates will all be Unionist. The same happens in reverse in predominantly 
Nationalist areas - hence the trouble in e.g. the Shankill where a great many 
people feel disenfranchised.
>
> Might need some fairly clever crypto to allow that to hold
> secure secret ballot as well, if it is possible...

Nah. Just put 1, 2, 3 ... in the boxes instead of X in one of them.

BTW would someone please tell me why we have marked ballot papers even though 
we claim to have a secret ballot? I've heard a few explanations, but none 
that hold water.

Brian Beesley