[clug] eVACS lives!

[Martin Pool]

On 27 Jan 2004, David Gibson <david at gibson.dropbear.id.au> wrote:

> > 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.
> 
> Printed receipts doesn't make this any worse though - the idea is that
> they would go into a ballot box just like hand written ballot papers
> do now.

That idea is discussed here

  http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61334,00.html

In their system, the voter can see the printed ballot behind glass but
cannot touch or remove it.  So it's not really a receipt in the normal
sense of the word -- a written confirmation kept after a transaction.

> At present you're *supposed* to drop your ballot paper in the
> ballot box before leaving (and everyone does), but I gather that
> electoral officials can't actually force you to do so.  
> This situation would be similar with printed receipts.

It's not quite the same: if you don't drop your handwritten ballot in
the box, then you haven't voted, and so you can't use the ballot as
proof that you made a particular vote.  If you left the polling place
with your printout in addition to it being recorded electronically,
then you would both have a mismatch between the counts and also have
the possibility of vote buying.  So I think it would have to be kept
behind glass.

I would be curious to see how they handle a voter who complains "but
that wasn't what I voted!"

-- 
Martin 
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