On Tue, 1 Feb 2000, Aaron wrote:
>
> Yo cypherpunks,
>
> Any ideas how much of the country uses electronic voting? Here in Texas it's still
>paper ballots.
Funny you should mention that. Clark County, Nevada (my nominal home
town of the moment) uses voting machines from Sequoia Pacific. Not
everyone is happy with the system :
http://nj.npri.org/nj98/08/democracy.htm
http://nj.npri.org/nj98/04/feedme.htm
Instead of reading me, though, you might do well to check out Lorrie Faith
Cranor's hotlist of voting links :
http://www.ccrc.wustl.edu/~lorracks/sensus/hotlist.html
I don't see a paper specifically on current deployment of voting systems,
but maybe asking on her voting mail list she runs would turn up something:
http://www.research.att.com/~lorrie/voting/
> I'm thinking about vote fraud here. No idea if current computerized systems are
>tamper proof, but that seems possible.
> Maybe in the future, we'll all vote via internet, and the results they post
>afterwards will have been determined in
> advance. Maybe that's already the case.
Maybe we should consider stupidity before malice? It's much more likely
that we'll all vote via the internet, but the election will have to be
re-run six or seven times due to software malfunctions. By this time,
of course, no one will notice or complain, because "don't elections
always fail the first time?"
If we're lucky, we'll have a publically verifiable protocol which does
not require us to compromise the anonymity of any participant.
Unfortunately, running the verification protocol will take six weeks,
and when it's done we'll find out that a worm cracked into all of our
computers and marked all the ballots with "Shlomo Sternberg". No one
noticed before because the verification protocol doesn't reveal any of the
ballots until the entire counting and verification is complete.
(substitute Sternberg with whatever you think a script kiddie would
vote for)
Cryptographers will be called as expert witnesses in a court charged
with the unhappy task of deciding the winner of the election. There
they will be ripped apart by OS security experts in a gleeful orgy
of exclamations like "but a consumer PC is *not* trusted hardware!"
Eventually the court will flip a coin to decide the outcome (after
being sourly advised by one of the surviving cryptographers that
computer-generated "random" numbers, and especially those produced by
QuickBASIC, may not be appropriate for the occasion). One party will
win. The rest immediately appeal and/or call for a new election.
After a while it'll get to the point that the replacement elections
preemptively interrupt themselves, on the assumption that the preceding
election is going to fail. You'll need a bot to keep track of them all.
If you don't tell the bot different, it keeps voting the same way; as a
consequence, incumbent parties will try to hold elections during popular
TV series like "Ally McBeal." Every now and then this will backfire, as
the more advanced bots pick up on what the user's watching (but not why)
and repeatedly vote Calista Flockhart into every office in the nation.
Yeah, going to be a fun world to live in all right.
