No Pissing Matches, please

[Kurt Cockrum]

On Thursday, December 03, 1998 12:30 AM Rich said, as quoted by Joe Mabel:
>[...]
>(2) If electronic voting is too tough to implement (which surprises me) how 
>about some form of mail-in ballot?
>[...]

I wouldn't be in such a hurry to implement electronic voting methods.
A "voting program" is relatively easy to do, as long as it isn't used as
a tool to decide high-stake matters.

The BBmenu software already has voting software present.  Early on
in the scn project, I visited the cleveland freenet and saw theirs in action.
It was rather amusing, but I quail at the thought of such software being used
to count the votes in a hotly contested election.  To bring it home, a
hotly contested SCNA board election.

I don't know what it would take to convince me that I should respect the results
of such an election, besides superior firepower.  And I don't even wanna
*think* about the security issues!  Talk about a quagmire!

I think high-stakes voting should be done in an "all-meat" environment, not
inside a computer.  Voting software might be useful for "pulse-taking"
and demographic purposes, but it's just like a spring scale, i. e. not legal
in trade.  Or it should'nt be.

I'm also worried about the "instant-results" aspects of electronic voting.
Superficially, it looks like a real aid to democracy.  But there's a
deliberative aspect to democracy that in real life, would simply be sacrificed
to give the illusion of "universal participation", IMO.  The deliberative part
served as a "low-pass" filter that limits large and wild excursions in policy over
short periods of time, what we might expect if we had "instant democracy".
The argument that this disenfranchises the impatient just doesn't cut it IMO.

These are problems common to all systems that crucially depend on feedback with
time-constants.  Mess with the time-constants and the system falters or dies, or
goes into a chaotic mode.

A real-world example is "just-in-time" inventory systems, which function well
only in perfectly harmonious conditions, i. e. they lack all robustness, which
has been exploited to advantage by the labor movement in some cases (yay!);
JIT systems are very vulnerable to strikes as some nasty corporations are finding
out these days...

So we ought to be real careful whenever something looks good just because it
happens faster.  Not only does the speed-up make things worse, but there are
other zero-summish trade-offs (like reliability, security) that might be unacceptable.

But I don't think a real and sustainable electronic democracy could exist unless
the auditing and integrity-monitoring tools were available to, and *used* by everyone,
not just the people that do the election, the cops and policy-makers.  It would have
to be a *lot* better designed than any internet protocol I ever heard of.

See, the thing about *real* democracy is, ya gotta RTFM.  :)

Do secure electronic voting protocols exist?  I imagine that they might be
related to the double-blinding techniques used in clinical studies, to minimize
observer biasing effects in statistical analysis.

Maybe some Electronic Democracy (or Demarchy?) Foundation could come up
with a Beowulf-style distributed voting application and put it under a GPL :)
Don't know if I'd trust it, though.

It's important to remember that
democracy is a different kind of problem than protecting data from
snoopers, or making sure it hasn't been messed with.  I think a lot of
policy-makers have failed to understand this, or have ignored it for political
advantage.

I recommend the book
	Jacobs, Jane
	Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics
	ISBN 0-394-55079-X [hc; also in a Basic Books pb ed]
	92-50157
	HF5387.J32 1992
for insights on the general subject.  Comments from readers of the book welcome.
--kurt
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