>On 10/09/2013 4:28 PM, Jan Whitaker quoted The Age: > >> Mr Turnbull, who was easily elected to his Sydney seat of Wentworth >> on Saturday, said he thought there was also a large number of people >> who voted fraudulently, "in the sense that they go to the polling >> place and say they're someone else". >> >> He said he thought many people who did so were voting for a friend or >> relative who was away or sick - and that this was based on anecdotal >> evidence he had received since first running for Parliament in 2004. >> >> Impersonating another voter in a polling place is a serious offence >> and carries a jail term of 6 months.
At 16:47 +1000 10/9/13, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote: >And how does e-voting fix this? >Or is he conflating e-voting with a national ID system? Possibly. However the report continues: >Mr Turnbull said that electronic voting could be done in a closed network in the polling booth so that it could not be hacked from the internet. ... >He suggested that an electronic system could point out to voters if they were about to cast an informal vote and give them the opportunity to correct it. So he could be proposing no change to the elector-authentication process, and only a change to the means whereby the elector's vote is recorded. It would presumably cost quite a bit to kit a very large number of locations, once every 1-3 years, with kit that's certified-hardware-secure, and runs software that is effective, sufficiently flexible, and certified-software-secure (whatever that means) and certified-data-secure (which isn't easy to spec). And maybe the hardware would have to have a screen 2 metres wide ... It would be interesting to know how much lower the informal vote would be if a user-friendly application were in place. A quick stab in the dark is below. Sensitivity testing is always fun. ________________________________________________________________________ Blank 28.9 No effect? Or would that be rejected?? Protest 16.9 No effect? Just 1 27.8 Some effect? Say 20% Ticks 11.8 Some effect, perhaps considerable? Say 50% Non-seq 9.2 Some effect, perhaps considerable? Say 50% TOTAL 94.6 (I wonder what the 5.4% do) So maybe 17% would become formal, of 6% of 15 million = 153,000 Across 150 electorates, that's 1,000 votes per electorate. If the votes are distributed much the same as the already-formal votes, then there's no change in the outcomes. There might be some bias towards Labor, if error-making is correlated with lower-socio-ec demographics, and if people in that demographic still think Labor is what it's name suggests. But even if the difference in distribution were considerable, very few seats would change hands as a result of the investment. So don't look for payback from that quarter. -- Roger Clarke http://www.rogerclarke.com/ Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA Tel: +61 2 6288 6916 http://about.me/roger.clarke mailto:[email protected] http://www.xamax.com.au/ Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law University of N.S.W. Visiting Professor in Computer Science Australian National University _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
