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One word that all posts above forget:
One word that all posts above forget:
Posted Aug 9, 2007 13:57 UTC (Thu) by hummassa (subscriber, #307)In reply to: Securing our votes by NRArnot
Parent article: Securing our votes
VOTE SECRECY. There is a very good reason why your vote is secret.
<slashdot-esque-fiction-mode>
1. I am your boss (and the boss of 10000 other people)
2. I say to you: "vote on Joe Corrupt for me, and then take a pic of the
thingy on the clearbox with your cell phone and bring it to me by monday,
or don't bother coming at all." (*)
3. Joe Corrupt wins the election by 10000 votes.
4. ???
5. Profit!!
</slashdot-esque-fiction-mode>
(*) just to be clear: I work in a governmental institution with 3000
employees and 300 interns and apprentices. The two buildings have,
combined, some 4000 cell phones. I believe at least 3000 of them have
cameras.
I haven't seen a good (== fast && cheap && secure [IMHO]) alternative to
electronic voting yet. So, I'll refer you to my reccount of my experiences
and opinions:
http://lwn.net/Articles/100202/
http://lwn.net/Articles/100326/
HTH.
(Log in to post comments)
One word that all posts above forget:
Posted Aug 9, 2007 15:34 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]
All currently available approaches have this problem. Collecting your camera phone at the counter and giving it back to you after is the only solution I can see; IE: a policy against taking cameras of any kind to the booth. Since the booths aren't actually booths anymore, they're generally in the open, this is less of an issue, I suspect -- it would be obvious if you had a phone or camera out.
Loved your riff, though. :-)
One word that all posts above forget:
Posted Aug 9, 2007 15:38 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]
One other observation: if the ballots are numbered sequentially, and you log the random starting number -- or print "FIRST BALLOT" on it -- then you can audit that a stack is complete, and extra-counting organizations, as you mention in your other posting, can tell they have all the ballots.
And it should be cheap enough to build counting boxes that lots of different people can do it commercially, and such orgs can all buy them from different people, or even build them themselves, and if the paper handling is good enough, then the ballots will *survive* 50 counts.
Hell, the election officials themselves could buy counting machines from different manufacturers and run each election through twice and compare.
And *none of the equipment is on the security critical path* in this approach, in case anyone missed that.
You *can* have preliminary counts come out of the terminals themselves, but there's no sense in hacking those, because the system procedures make it worthless to change them -- the dual count of voter-approved paper will show any mistakes.
One word that all posts above forget:
Posted Aug 16, 2007 22:30 UTC (Thu) by edgewood (subscriber, #1123) [Link]
Jane Employee: OK, boss!
Jane ventures down to the voting booth, punches up a ballot for Joe Corrupt, <click> takes a picture of it under the plexiglass, then presses the "Spoiled Ballot" button. She votes for her preferred candidate, then pushes the "Correct Ballot" button.
She then delivers the picture of the vote she didn't actually cast to her boss, and anonymously calls the Election Commission on her way home.