No Pissing Matches, please

[Kenneth Crandall]

Hi Kurt,  You have listed your misgivings toward electronic voting.  What
about the other idea of mail-in ballot.  That has been used successfully in
our election process.
									Ken Crandall

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-scn at scn.org [mailto:owner-scn at scn.org]On Behalf Of Kurt
> Cockrum
> Sent: Tuesday, December 08, 1998 9:29 PM
> To: scn at scn.org
> Cc: jmabel at saltmine.com; kurt at grogatch.seaslug.org; scna-board at scn.org
> Subject: Re: No Pissing Matches, please
>
>
> 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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