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Permalink Reply by Vinay Gupta on July 21, 2008 at 6:25pm

Alex, I wrote a paper suggesting a US foreign policy based on appropriate technology. One of the items I suggested was a platform for global democracy:

http://guptaoption.com/2.long_peace.php

I think a lot of people everywhere, including in the US Govt., look very favorably on secure voting and real democracy, although I'll certainly agree with you that many (Diebold and their supporters) do not.

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Permalink Reply by alexweir1949 on July 23, 2008 at 3:10pm

US Govt does NOT look at all favorably on secure voting and real democracy - otherwise why did they demote Madeleine Williams from Head of Elections and Democracy to some field job in Cairo after she got interested in using my voting system (cd3wd.com/SEEV/) for the 2007 Nigerian Election?....

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Permalink Reply by Vinay Gupta on July 23, 2008 at 3:30pm

The US Govt. is something like two million people - plus contractors - and I've seen levels of organizational schizophrenia that literally beggar belief. It's quite possible for some bits of the USG to be for something, others to be against it, others to ignore it, and still others to wondering if they're getting another nice holiday on its budget... it's not a coherent organization, to a degree which genuinely frightens me.

That said, if the rhetoric on democracy was matched by the field performance, the world would be a much better and safer place, yes.

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Permalink Reply by Sepp on July 23, 2008 at 7:22pm

Perhaps not only for the third world?

The voting systems in developed countries have always been plagued by instances of fraud - from votes of certain districts dumped in garbage disposals to the easy fraud of electronic voting (think diebold)...

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Permalink Reply by Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson on July 26, 2008 at 12:21am

I am ignorant. Explain to me why an electronic voting system is preferred over one where lots of people, from all parties, participate and hand count?

Do the hand count systems only work in well ordered societies? If so why?

All computer systems which are used to summarise data has a data/root access account or a software flaw somewhere. If you find the flaw or the vulnerable person with the root account and keep it quite until voting day, you can hide the fact that fraud happened. Whereas if you have lots of people involved in the process, from all parties, then it is harder to cheat, as you have to deal with so many people.

Where am I going wrong in this thinking?

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Permalink Reply by Vinay Gupta on July 26, 2008 at 1:23am

Well, there's two angles.

The first is cryptography. Things like cumulative hashing and digital signatures really help prevent tampering with votes. And you can retain local control, where each group tallies and publishes (digitally signed) to the internet, and then a second process totals the results, for example.

The second problem is voter coercion. Correctly-designed e-voting systems can be made much, much more resistant to voter coercion.

But, for me, it's all about the crypto.

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Permalink Reply by Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson on July 27, 2008 at 6:45pm

So, what is missing in GNU.FREE that one can add to make it a secure system then?

http://www.gnu.org/software/free/

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Permalink Reply by Vinay Gupta on July 28, 2008 at 5:30am

Lordy, I don't know where to begin. Here's the crux of it: we need secure facilities where people can vote free of coercion in a biometrically verified environment. A booth where you walk in with your ballot, where you cannot vote twice because of the biometric security measures, and walk out knowing your vote has been received.

CheapID envisages that those booths are dual-use - they're used in banks, they're used in lawyer's offices, they're dotted around the place as part of the normal commercial infrastructure. Come an election, they double up as voting booths. The booths can be relatively simple, but they really need to be dual use to be economic in poor areas.

Without a hardware component, I don't know how to make voting genuinely secure. Ron Rivest has done a ton of work on electronic voting protocols and, if you have a workable solution of some kind (CheapID or not,) much of his work can be applied to the problem.

But the key is creating a place where one can cast a vote and know it will be counted, that fraudulent votes cannot be created, and that allows coercion to be secretly indicated. The ballot box is very, very good, and to do better needs extensive measures.

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Permalink Reply by Sepp on July 29, 2008 at 2:26pm

With cheap (and reliable) ID, what would be wrong with doing away with all the physical voting boxes claptrap and voting directly, using the internet?

There must be a way to unequivocally identify a voter and to prevent double use of the ID (or misuse of soeone else's ID), even if it's done on the internet.

I believe only that way we could get the required density (frequency) of voting events that make for a real participatory democracy.

Voting should not be too far separated from discussing the issues, which would also happen in preference on-line.

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Permalink Reply by Smári McCarthy on July 27, 2008 at 11:21pm

This is what I've been talking about doing with what I've called the Shadow Parliament Project. It's about secure distributed democracy by crowdsourcing legislature. The principle is that instead of a typical republic system where authority is delegated to a higher authority, or a direct democracy system where everything breaks down as soon as voter turnout drops low, you add a third function to the voting system - the first two exist everywhere: abstain or cast vote. The third is elect proxy.

I have talked about this in detail in numerous other places, but seriously, this is what we want to do. PGP keys or CheapID or IDhash as authentication and then proxyable voting on top.

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Permalink Reply by Josef Davies-Coates on July 29, 2008 at 4:09pm

I recently came across this article/ wiki http://churmo.pbwiki.com/ on the "Billion People Phone" or Bphone...


Where I was please to discover discussion of Open Vote stuff http://churmo.pbwiki.com/OpenVote, potentially powered by the same technologies my colleagues are developing for http://opencoin.org :)

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