Re: [ga-ext] On-Line Voting

["William S. Lovell" <wsl@cerebalaw.com>]

I would concur with what Joop says, but it does raise another question.
In
subscribing to list whatever, we get "confirmation" emails back, so
as to
ensure that someone is not spoofing -- an email that purported to come
from wsl@cerebalaw.com actually did so, because a responsive email
back
TO wsl@cerebalaw.com having an identity code in it was returned FROM
wsl@cerebalaw.com, bearing that same identity code.  My question
is this:
what's to prevent some diehard from getting a couple dozen or so of
the
free "email from anywhere" accounts, using a different name each time,
and then voting that many times in an election? The party on the other
end
would have no way of knowing that some dozen votes in fact all came
from and were confirmed as above by one guy on one computer (by which
I mean through the same ISP -- I might myself use two different computers;
the following shows why I must go through the same ISP).

The way that I know all of you guys are not Joop is that it is a long way to
NZ.  I have an office on the Coast, my old ISP has a local number there
but the new one does not.  I can get my current email down there with a
dial-in through the old ISP, simply by putting my current ISP in as the
incoming mail server.  But I cannot send email out through my new ISP;
I must send it out through the old email server to which I am then connected.
If  try to send email from the Coast using the outgoing email server of my
new ISP (to which I am not then directly dialed in), bells go off, whistles blow,
and errors flash all over the screen -- I'm a cheating spoofer or whatever.

Bill Lovell

Joop Teernstra wrote:

At 19:00 17/05/01 -0400, Danny Younger wrote:>I have noticed that the At-Large Study Committee has posted studies such as>"Security Considerations for Remote Electronic Voting over the Internet," by>Avi Rubin http://avirubin.com/e-voting.security.html>>That particular paper also refers to another recent study (March 2001), the>"National Workshop on Internet Voting">http://netvoting.org/Resources/InternetVotingReport.pdf>>Both of these studies imply that on-line elections are not technologically>feasible at this time.Having actually worked with online voting , I must say that there is a great deal of FUD in reports that seek perfection in security.  Ask election.com or any other commercial voting provider.Even with a so-called free vote in the Booth, where there is no password security, I have never found any significant attempt to cheat.Iris-reading identification? Ridiculous!This is not about keeping intruders out of high-security facilities.Even rudimentary  identification systems should be acceptable to create a voters' roll.The postal address system that ICANN used for the last @large election , was one of such.If there are 100.000 voters, you do not need watertight security to keep a dozen false identities out.Unless there is an extremely close election result, it does not make any difference.It certainly is no excuse or reason to abandon on-line voting.Just as in paper ballot voting there can be cheating, nobody in his right mind uses this as an argument to stop giving people the vote.
 

--Joop--
Founder of the Cyberspace Association.
Former bootstrap of the IDNO (www.idno.org)
Developer of    The Polling Booth
www.democracy.org.nz/vote1/