Re: Surprising Pattern of Florida's Election Results

From: Phil Sherrod (phil.sherrod_at_REMOVETHISsandh.com)
Date: 11/18/04 

Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 17:15:30 GMT

On 18-Nov-2004, examachine@gmail.com (Eray Ozkural exa) wrote:

> I cannot say anything about US politics, but isn't it obvious that the
> *only* way to prevent vote fraud is by using machines that produce
> cryptographic paper trails, which can be publicly verified afterwards?
> It's a no-brainer, but why can't US, arguably the biggest IT industry
> in the world, manage it? After all, you've got some of the brightest
> crypto researchers in the world. They could solve the theory part in
> one day. And IBM could design the machine in two months. These
> discussions are quite unfortunate.

Doesn't that open the door to someone (either a hacker or insider) being
able to determine how every person voted? How about we make a deal: we pay
you $500,000 to set up the system, but if any votes by individuals are
revealed within the next decade you die. Are you willing to sign up for
that?

So what would you do, print out a paper receipt with an encrypted vote
receipt? Then if there was a question about votes, would you have all
voters bring in their receipts so that they could be compared to the
recorded count? What if some voters (let's say poor people) discarded or
lost their receipts more frequently than other groups (let's say party
activists), how would you make the recount fair? 

-- 
Phil Sherrod
(phil.sherrod 'at' sandh.com)
http://www.dtreg.com  (decision tree modeling)
http://www.nlreg.com  (nonlinear regression)
http://www.NewsRover.com (Usenet newsreader)
http://www.LogRover.com (Web statistics analysis)

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