E-vote advocates still don't get it...

Posted Jan 30, 2020 21:58 UTC (Thu) by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152)
In reply to: E-vote advocates still don't get it... by dvdeug
Parent article: Cryptography and elections

But how will your magician get his/her hands on the ballot box when it's not physically accessible by the public (that's the way it's here in Sweden and everything else dskoll writes about Canada matches how it works here as well).

Or are the master plan to infiltrate the election officials at each polling station just for the chance of possible switching out one of the several ballot boxes. The cost of this heist would be quite large and the probability of success quite low.

Magicians are also not "magic", I'm quite sure that the ones that you have seen have prepared both the location and the items used way in advance. Or are we now going to play the game that "psychics" always use when asked why they never use their powers to win at the lottery, stock market or race track. Or are there thousands of unsolved bank heists and other thefts done by rouge magicians and we just don't hear about them...

How magicians do it

Posted Feb 3, 2020 0:04 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Indeed.

There's a nice interview with Penn Jillette where he explains that the great escape artist Houdini used to tour and he'd get some local blacksmith or whatever to make the "inescapable" box he was to be locked inside and there'd be a whole presentation about look this was made by this local person so you know it's for real. Houdini sent them plans. Build this exact thing I've designed or else we won't use it and you won't get the prestige associated. And so actually Houdini isn't escaping from your local blacksmith's impossible trap, he's escaping from a box he meticulously designed and has practised many times. It's still a good trick, but if you'd arrested and imprisoned Houdini he wouldn't have magically vanished from his cell because he wasn't actually magic.