[ale] Re: Vote Today - Message from Marie

[Joseph A Knapka]

Irv Mullins wrote:
> On Tuesday 05 November 2002 11:35 am,  Matt wrote:
> 
> 
>>As soon as whatever you vote with/on is removed from your view, there is
>>ALWAYS the potential for corruption to occur.  Why not just have a little
>>faith in the process that's being used and get on with your lives.  If you
>>feel the process is so flawed, don't use it.  Make them work a little
>>harder by having to actually fabricate votes rather than just changing
>>yours.
> 
> 
> There always has been, and will continue to be, vote fraud.

Not necessarily. In "Applied Cryptography", Bruce Schneier outlines
cryptographically secure protocols that prohibit votes from being
changed by anyone other than the caster, prohibit ballot-stuffing,
ensure that every vote is properly counted exactly once, and possess
a number of other useful properties. With such an implementation,
it would be impossible for even the programmer who writes the
code to alter election results, since any voter can execute
a cryptographic challenge against the results to ensure that
their vote is correctly counted, and no one without an unreasonably
huge amount of computing power would be able to alter the results
without being detected.

If we're gonna use electronic voting, we ought to do it right.

-- Joe


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