voting "machines" eliminate voting [LWN.net]

voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 18, 2008 23:11 UTC (Tue) by joey (guest, #328)
In reply to: voting "machines" eliminate voting by joey
Parent article: Sequoia v. Ed Felten

In all fairness, I should note that publishing a tally sheet like this, which you can use to
prove your vote to a third party, does make it easy for votes to be bought. Which is a
property that is not desirable in a real-life voting system..

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voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 18, 2008 23:42 UTC (Tue) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link] (2 responses)

As I understand it, the Debian voting is also based on sending gpg encrypted and signed votes to a server that is trusted to keep it secret. That would also not work in real elections. A good voting protocol must be designed so that the "who gave this vote" and "what is the content of the vote" are never known to the same party/component. At the same time of course it must be proven that who gave the vote is eligible to vote and voted only once.

There are however protocols that can do this, some quite good, some "almost there". This is quite a good summary of all protocols out there.

voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 19, 2008 7:41 UTC (Wed) by pkolloch (subscriber, #21709) [Link]

Or look at 

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingo_Voting (German)

or

http://punchscan.org/

voting "machines" eliminate voting

Posted Mar 19, 2008 9:43 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

A good voting protocol must be designed so that...

As I wrote above, the important thing is public confidence.  Britain's major public elections
have always made it possible (though not trivial) to match every single vote cast to the
voter's name and address.  But British people have yet to do more than occasionally moan that
this seems a little underhanded.

To get specific, each ballot paper in a British election is numbered and when you're handed a
ballot paper its number is written next to your name on the list of those eligible to vote in
the election. This material must by law be kept for some time after the election is over. All
you need is a reverse index (painful sixty years ago, but easy now) and you have a list of how
everyone voted.

We know (from documents released under a time limit rule) that previous governments have
secretly authorised security services to match the numbers up and then target people who voted
for certain minority parties. Obviously today's government denies that it would do such a
thing, but that's the nature of politics.