The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

real_aardvark · 2008-03-26 Reply Admin

Yannick:
Computer voting isn't that hard. I figure I could develop the system in a day, debug it over the course of a week, and then spend a month or so on a correctness proof.

How much time more do you need to tweak a bit the program for me to be elected whatever without any visible glitch in the code? I'll give you 1 million $ for that, seems fine?

A good programmer is the worse thing that can append to e-voting, except for a bad one.

E-voting is a really bad idea. If you understand a bit computers, search the web for more informations. There are plenty of material to convince any technicaly-minded people that such a system is a failure by design.

Maybe just start by Bruce Schneier text (already mentionned), you certainly already know him: http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-voting/article_2213.jsp

Yannick

OK, Yannick, I started by reading Bruce Schneier. It's bollocks; a bunch of straw-man arguments.

E-voting is a slippery concept. I'll replace it with "computerised voting." On Schneier's principles"

(1) You get what you vote for. Therefore the vote has to be cast in a (human) secured environment. Doesn't really matter whether it's touch-screen, or rubbing two wands together to produce the requisite static charge: the important things are that (a) you are validated as a voter -- and one who has not voted before in the same election -- and (b) you can check your entry before leaving. I believe dialog boxes (or, in the case of static electricity, either dowsing rods or praying to a relevant God) are sufficient for this. (2) A percentage of elections are contested. Easy. Record every action at the polling booth on a sequential medium: tape, time-stamped TCP/IP request/responses to one or more central servers; whatever. Admittedly, there's a slight problem here when you're talking about rubbing two sticks together.

I'm pretty damn' sure the (primitive) technology is there.

I'm pretty damn' sure that suitable levels of encryption can be employed.

I have absolutely no clue why anybody should consider a paper trail desirable. Ever heard of ballot-stuffing?

Once again, if it works for credit cards, it can be made to work for elections; at least as well, and almost certainly better, than the current mess.

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