Re: [tlug] Somewhat OT- open source software for US voting machines

["Edmund Edgar" <lists@example.com>]

Ian Wells wrote:

> 3. You must ensure that votes cannot be purchased.  (Which is a
> slightly different problem - I can freely choose to vote for who
> someone paid me to vote for.)
>
> In order to do this, elections are held as secret ballots.  And if the
> environment in which the voter places their vote is not strictly
> controlled, the ballot cannot possibly be secret.
>
> Thus, if you place a vote on the internet, someone could be checking
> that you vote the way you agreed to vote.  Postal votes have a similar
> problem, which is why the UK's insistence that postal votes are great
> because they increase turnout irritates me every time I read it.  I've
> yet to hear of a better system than voting in a booth.  (Incidentally,
> one way of spoiling a ballot in the UK is to sign it.)

Like you say, you can't ensure that votes can't be purchased. There's nothing to stop you taking the vote-buyer's money then voting for the person they requested.

What you can do is ensure that people can lie about who they voted for.

I mention that because there are some things you could do to help people lie with absentee (either postal or online) voting that would only require them to visit the strictly controlled environment once. In an online context, one option would be to allow people to create multiple usernames and passwords, all but one of which were dummies. (You'd have to visit the secure booth to set which one was real.) They could then use one account for their real votes and another account to persuade their customer that they'd got their money's worth. Another option would be to only have a single account, but to let people set whether they wanted it to be a positive vote for a candidate or a negative vote against them.

Obviously with an online system you still have the huge disadvantage that you can't properly secure the computer being used at home, however good your audit processes are on the server system that counts the votes. Since many people's PC's have already been rooted, you might end up with greater representation by Chinese spammers in your political system than you would have liked.

But it might still be worth doing because if people could vote easily and often you could make your political system so much better than the current one, which makes all kinds of nasty compromises to work around the limitations of 17th Century logistics.

Edmund Edgar