Mechanical voting and reliability

Mechanical voting and reliability

Posted Aug 20, 2004 13:51 UTC (Fri) by hummassa (subscriber, #307)
In reply to: With the e-Vote "Fair Elections" are History by huffd
Parent article: Will 'controlled open source' software take over election work? (NewsForge)

With mechanical voting, there are the following possible frauds:
1. insertion of pre-printed ballots in the boxes
2. magical creation of boxes full of ballots
3. magical creation of districts
4. swinging the numbers during/after the counts

All these frauds are possible because of the slowness of counting and difficulty of manually adding the ditricts.

With fully digital voting (*) there are the following possible frauds:
1. insertion of swings in the votes (each two votes for A adds/switches one for B)
2. identifying each voter with its vote, in some point in the future (possible coercion)
3. can't think of other

In both cases, the solutions are the same: Fiscalization. Many eyeballs. Free press. Free speech. Full and thorough investigation in the cases that raise doubts (**)

(*) Take a look at my post below, to se a model that IMNSHO *works*.

(**) This last one is the most important: don't you think some people today holding high offices in the USofA would be in jail because of the last presidential elections' snafu if the investigation of it was full and thorough?

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