Re: [ga] Re: A Question for the Candidates

[Barbara Simons <simons@acm.org>]

I agree that corporate elections take place on a regular basis with little
to no difficulty.  Frequently, they have paper ballots, and they are rarely
contentious.  If there were a high stakes election with large numbers of
supporters on both sides and a significant number of votes that were cast
via computer with no paper ballot backup, then you might start seeing some
real dissension.  Under the scenario that I describe, there would be no way
for the winners to prove that they won fair and square, if indeed they did,
and there would be no way for the losers to convince themselves that they
had actually lost - especially in a close election.

However, I am much more concerned about governmental elections where the
stakes frequently are high and people could well be motivated to attempt to
steal the election.  As I mentioned, the Senatorial race in Georgia in 2002
resulted in a major upset that contradicted both opinion and exit polls.
The entire state used computerized voting machines with no backup.
Consequently, there is no way of knowing whether or not that election was
stolen.  

Please read the material on David Dill's webpage, especially the FAQ, which
is not long and can be found at http://verify.stanford.edu/EVOTE/faq.html.

Regards,
Barbara  

On 3/12/03 12:34 PM, "John Berryhill Ph.D. J.D." <john@johnberryhill.com>
wrote:

> 
> For the purpose of board elections, every publically-traded company in the
> United States manages to conduct elections which involve the voting of
> millions of shares of stock owned by people all over the world, and they
> manage to do so without tremendous difficulty because the concerns in such
> board elections are not the same as those of political elections in Santa
> Clara County.
> 
> The idea that a corporation cannot have a simple distributed voting mechanism
> for electing board members flies in the face of the reality of corporate
> elections which are conducted all of the time without any significant
> problems whatsoever.  There is no need to reinvent the wheel here.
> 
> Do multinational corporations conduct large scale elections?  Yes.  All of
> the time.  And without incident.

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