[clug] eVACS lives!

[matt andrews]

Martin Pool wrote:

> On 27 Jan 2004, David Gibson <david at gibson.dropbear.id.au> wrote:
> 
>>On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 11:56:28AM +1100, Steve Jenkin wrote:
>>
>>>Saw this on the ACM Technews list and thought that some of the
>>>contributors may still read the CLUG list.
>>>Love the way that 'Software Improvements' are
>>>
>>>http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2004-6/0121w.html#item1 [copied at
>>>end]
>>>
>>>This summary points to the base article.  I'm sure there's many more.
>>>http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61968,00.html
>>>
>>>Canberra consistently 'punches above it weight' in IT, especially in
>>>Open Source.
>>>
>>>Something I wasn't aware of [is this claim true?] - that the AEC was
>>>offered but did not want a 'VVPAT' - Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail.
>>>[A printer in _every_ polling booth - many $$$$]
>>
>>Not just many $$$.  Printers just aren't reliable - they jam, mess up
>>prints, etc. etc.  When you're trying to guarantee various properties
>>about the number and nature of receipts printed, this makes life very
>>difficult indeed.  This, I think, is one of the primary reasons the
>>AEC didn't like the idea of a attempting to implement a vvpat.
> 
> 
> Printing a receipt sounds fairly silly.  There are severe theoretical
> problems, aside from practicality and cost.
> 
> Australian elections are meant to be secret ballots.  Printing a
> record of how someone voted would encourage coercion or vote-buying by
> giving a record of how the person voted.
> 
> Printing a receipt does not address any important threat model.  If
> the machines are corrupt it would be trivial for them to print one
> thing and record another.  If the machines are merely flaky then it is
> easy to imagine that some votes would be lost after being printed.
> 
> Printing out receipts does not give a credible voter-verified audit
> trail anyhow, since the voter cannot verify that that the vote was
> permanently recorded and counted.  There are crypto protocols to allow
> voters to verify the whole process and it might be nice to use them,
> but they are a very large change from how we vote at the moment[0].
> The paper voting system relies on trusted observers monitoring the
> process, so it is reasonable that electronic voting works the same
> way.
> 
> If you *did* go to a crypto protocol that allowed both verifiability
> and anonymity, then you lose the ability for humans to verify it.
> (Factored many 2048-bit numbers recently?)
> 
> If the receipt *does* show something different to how you meant to
> vote, how are you supposed to resolve this?
> 
> Electoral officials should not normally connect a completed ballot
> with the voter[1], but resolving any problems with a receipt probably
> involves the person presenting the receipt to an official and losing
> their anonymity.
> 
> You don't get a receipt for a paper vote.  Why should an electronic
> vote be any different?

here is a very interesting proposal to address this:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/25/213206

cheers

matt andrews.


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