Install PAC-MAN on Sequoia voting machine w/o breaking tamper-evident seals

Post by dhs » Tue, Aug 24, 2010, 3:44 PM UTC

shrikant wrote: post #41

cubicle67 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I voted on Saturday (Australian election). No id required, 100% paper votes, all counted by hand (as far as I'm aware) and we normally have a result within a few hours of polls in the West closing. Seems to work very well, but I guess one advantage we have is that none of the parties here are worth cheating for.

Might also help that Australia's population is about 22M. The USA are at 308M and India is 1180M - hand-counting ballots might just be a bigger problem with those kinds of numbers involved.

Germany has 80 m, and hand-counting works well. It does seem to be easy to parallelize.

Post by arghnoname » Tue, Aug 24, 2010, 4:27 PM UTC

dandelany wrote: post #45

arghnoname wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't let people look up their vote or their employers, spouse, etc, could force them to vote for preferred candidates. Ron Rivest has a system to make it verifiable and deniable (Three ballot system). There are others.

Rivest has the right idea in terms of thinking about this cryptographically... But the Three Ballot system would be an absolute mess :-P Remember hanging chads? Try telling people that to vote against a candidate, they have to mark them on one of three ballots...

Usability is a big problem with election systems. Making something anonymous, auditable, fraud resistant, affordable, etc and simultaneously make it usable more or less by everyone is tough.

They recently used a system called Scantegrity in Takoma Park, MD (Rivest also collaborated here). I've been meaning to look up the usability conclusions on this one, but I don't remember seeing much in the way of problems at the time.

Re: Install PAC-MAN on Sequoia voting machine w/o breaking tamper-evident seals

Re: Install PAC-MAN on Sequoia voting machine w/o breaking tamper-evident seals