[ale] OT: Electronic Voting in GA

[jknapka at earthlink.net (Joseph A Knapka)]

John Mills wrote:
> Joe, all -
> 
> On Sat, 19 Oct 2002, Joseph A Knapka wrote:
> 
> 
>>John Mills wrote:
> 
> 
>>>How would you compare auditing a direct-electronic voting system with
>>>auditing a state's old-style mechanical lever machines?
>>
> 
> Context - when I said 'mechanical' I meant the old lever style.
>  
> 
>>With mechanical voting machines you have an absolutely irrefutable
>>physical representation of each voter's vote.
> 
> 
> You don't have any way to know if your vote was actually added to the
> counter for your candidate, since the counters are out of sight (for their
> protection). Ultimately the totals were transcribed manually. Anyway,
> no one can afford to maintain or set up these beasts any more.
> 
> 
>>With any automated
>>system, you need some way to be sure that there isn't some code
>>in there that says, "No matter what buttons the voters press,
>>record 65% of the vote for candidate A and distribute the
>>remainder randomly among the other candidates."
> 
> 
> I certainly don't say this _can't_ happen, but there are some measures
> that can make it a bit trickier:
> 

Public key cryptography allows us to achieve provably
secure electronic voting, immune from this sort of
attack (see Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography") -
is the GA system using such techniques? Any electronic
voting system certainly ought to, but somehow I doubt
they actually do.

Cheers,

-- Joe


---
This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info. Problems should be 
sent to listmaster at ale dot org.