electronic voting revisited

[Brian High]

Kurt,

Thanks for bringing this issue up again.

I have been reading the O'Rielly and Associates' "PGP" book ... interesting
reading.  It seems that as long as a third party tabulated the
*encrypted-and-digitally-signed-(and thus authenticated)-votes* then as long as
that third party was observed by a fourth (auditing) party to destroy the indiviual
votes after the tabulation, you could preserve privacy (except that the third party
may *remember* certain votes). [Note: people would have to encrypt their votes on
their own private and secure machines -- not "online" on SCN.]

Of course, in my opinion, that SCNA was looking for two different kinds of e-voting
-- one for committee type work (not needing privacy) and one for SCNA Board of
Directors elections (needing privacy).

The former (non-private/non-secure) can be open and public and has already been
implemented with some success by our webmaster using CGI/HTML.  The latter
(private/secure) is probably not worth the administrative hassles of encryption and
keeping track of public keys and training voters on the use of encryption.

So, lets keep working toward e-democracy as far as committee (and community) work
-- and let major elections e-democracy be ironed out by larger, more determined,
and more capable institutions.

As for encryption, I will be getting back to that fascinating PGP book!  (By the
way, I was able to get a free RSA 'certificate' from Thawte in England and use it
successfully with Outlook Express with little hassle.  However, now that I am
thoroughly disgusted with M$'s recently discovered user-tracking mechanism --
embedding ID codes in your documents without your approval or notification ... and
collecting that data with their website using cookies -- I will be trying my RSA
certificate with Netscape/Linux this week (yes, I trust Linux developers more that
M$ developers).  Should be fun!  Lastly, I will see if I can use PGP with the same
degree of ease -- we'll see 'bout that one :-)

--Brian


Kurt Cockrum wrote:

> This is sort of out-of-the-blue, but it touches on past unresolved
>
>  fraud.  It is mathematically impossible, according to Professor Mercuri, to
>                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^
>  guarantee that votes are counted properly while maintaining voter anonymity.
>                           ^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^                   ^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^
>  [...]
>  Andy
>
> In other words, *take* *your* *pick*, but you can't have both.
>
> I could also dig up lots of citations from the RISKS list if anybody cared.
> While electronic voting could be a useful groupware tool, I don't think
> it's suitable as a high-stakes decision mechanism, and all the evidence
> bears me out.  As some of you might remember, I was adamantly against
> it.  I hope that buries the issue :)  Yes, I know I dug it up again :)
> --kurt



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