[clug] eVACS lives!

David Gibson david at gibson.dropbear.id.au
Tue Jan 27 05:04:47 GMT 2004


On Tue, Jan 27, 2004 at 03:14:46PM +1100, Martin Pool wrote:
> 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.

Sure that's another approach which makes a better attempt to enforce
leaving the receipts behind.  However I strongly suspect putting the
printer behind glass is going to make any printer problems much harder
to sort out.

> > 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.

Actually it is the same:
	a) I enter polling place, collect ballot paper, pretend to
fill it in and vote, but actually smuggle it out
	b) I visit you, fill out the ballot form in your presence,
give you the form and collect my reward
	c) You smuggle my ballot paper in to the polling place,
collect and fill out your own, drop both into the ballot box.

Or for larger numbers of bought votes, the voters after the first one
take in a filled out ballot, and come out with their own blank one.

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

Indeed.

-- 
David Gibson			| For every complex problem there is a
david AT gibson.dropbear.id.au	| solution which is simple, neat and
				| wrong.
http://www.ozlabs.org/people/dgibson
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