An Anonymous, Verifiable E-Voting Tech 236
Kilrah_il writes "After the recent news items about the obstacles facing E-voting systems, many of us feel it is not yet time for this technology. A recent TED talk by David Bismark unveiled a proposal for a new E-voting technology that is both anonymous and verifiable. I am not a cryptography expert, but it does seem interesting and possibly doable."
Re:Root problem (Score:3, Informative)
Your critique is entirely correct, and is very much taken into account by the Metagovernment project.
"The voter doesn't understand the legal code."
1. People don't have to participate in every decision, just the ones they care about and understand.
2. Since Metagovernment is a ground-up re-do of governance, it is a re-do of legal code as well. It is not intended to replace the US federal government just yet, but rather small communities' governance. Over time, people will get a better understanding of how to participate in large-scale governance as the system evolves.
"It was thought that electing "elite" officials who have our interests at heart but more direct knowledge of law would make better law makers."
1. This amounts to saying that we need to be protected from ourselves by a superior class of overlords. Do you really want to admit that is the best we can ever do?
2. These elites demonstrate again and again that they are just as idiotic as everyone else.
3. People don't get involved in issues because in the end their voice is ineffectual. If people can actually make a direct difference, they will have an entirely different incentive to learn and delve into issues.
"If you live in state that allows referendums this concept becomes very apparent."
1. Referendums are majority-rule decisions, while collaborative governance usually works on a consensus model.
2. Referendums are only on a few hot-button topics, meaning they lead to demagoguery. Having a "referendum" on every topic all the time would be completely different.
3. The authors of referendums are individual politicians or more frequently lobbyists. They are often written to be confusing or overly-simplified. Collaborative governance inherently means people write the laws together. Further, it pushes the process toward synthesis. Check out the amazing innovation in Vilfredo, for example.
All of this and more is on the Metagovernment site. It just takes some thinkin' to wrap your head around it.
His idea seemed bad to me (Score:3, Informative)
Besides, it's not that hard to create a paper ballot system that is secret and fair, but uses computers to speed the creation and counting.
Step 1. Have a printer kiosk that lets you select who you vote for electronically. It also shows 3 colors/icons/etc. You select a color/icon when you vote.
Step 2. The kiosk then prints out TWO identical bar coded paper receipts that does not have anything but numbers on it.
Step 3. Take bar coded paper receipt to second machine, called a reader.
Step 4. Feed one (either one) into the reader. That reader displays who you voted for, you can confirm or deny. Assuming you confirm, it keeps the one recepit and you keep your own. If you deny, it spits out the bad receipt, and you are legally required to shred both before you try again.
Step 5. To confirm your vote, you log on to a database, look for your recepit number and enter the color/icon you remembered. If you enter the wrong one, it displays a false vote without reveleaing that you entered the wrong color/icon.
Net result is that you and only you know who you voted for, and you can verify that your vote was counted.
Re:how much does it cost? (Score:3, Informative)
The only disadvantage is that it's slow, but so what? Voting is important, we can afford to slow down a little and do it carefully.
Somehow, Al Franken managed to be 7 or 8 months late on his first day of work, all because of delays in paperwork.
Re:how much does it cost? (Score:2, Informative)
I worked yesterday at the polls in New York. We had ImageCast paper-ballot optical-scan machines from Sequoia with ballot-marking devices attached for disabled voters. These gave all voters the ability to mark ballots privately.
http://www.vote-ny.com/english/machine-sequoia.php [vote-ny.com]
Re:how much does it cost? (Score:5, Informative)
Let's see:
* disabled people of all kinds,
* sick, old and just tired people who want to vote from home instead of driving for half an hour and then standing in line for an hour
* travelers who want to vote from wherever in the world they are
* young people who don't like boring old voting stuff
In almost all of these cases in the US e-voting favors Democrats - young, educated, lazy, traveling. That is the reason there is a subversive trend to undermine it by creating very, very badly misdesigned e-voting machines.
Now if your country does not have that problem, you might be like Estonia - every citizen gets an ID card with a proper PGP-ish electronic signature in it and he can vote on a web site using that signature either in a voting booth or at home and later verify his vote with a hash on a tally. And that has been fully working for two elections already with no problems.