RE: [wg-c] re: Choosing the intial testbed

["William X. Walsh" <william@userfriendly.com>]

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On 22-Mar-2000 Kendall Dawson wrote:
> My second and last post for the day -
> 
> At 09:57 AM 03/22/2000 -0800, William X. Walsh wrote:
>>How will voters be validated, and how will we prevent voter fraud and
>>multiple
>>voting by the same people?   If you do it by email address, I can have a
>>theoretically infinite number of votes, and I can easily write a small
>>program
>>to automatically vote using each of these infinitely possible email 
>>addresses.
>>If you do it by IP Address, then all I have to do is use the over 20 (and
>>growing) number of Free Internet services and login multiple times to each
>>one
>>(and then to multiple cities, since the voting process is short enough 
>>that the
>>long distance bill for such calls would be short enough to be cost
>>effective).
> 
> Sure, I understand what you are saying. The real world unfortunately makes 
> us go out of our way to prevent abuse from thieves and malcontents 
> everywhere. I don't know if you've been following the Arizona election or 
> not - but it was the first state-wide legal public election. All these same 
> issues came up - how do you validate people? how do you prevent fraud ? All 
> legitimate concerns - but, yet they still voted.

With requiring a physical presence and preregistration, you can do this.  But
none of this exists on the Internet.   The internet is international, Kendall.
 
> Should we stop the entire democratic process - or stop trying to prevent 
> abuse from the few rotten apples who continually spoil everything for 
> everyone? My suggestion would be to take away the incentive to cheat. No 
> matter WHAT you do - there is going to be some element of fraud. If you 
> require enough information up-front - Name, Address, Email, Phone, and 
> store it for the duration of the election - it will allow research into 
> fraudulent voting. Any person/group/constituency/registrar/company caught 
> trying to rig the system is not only instantly disqualified -- but 
> penalized severely as well. Something along the lines of  -- "5 year 
> probationary period you must wait before you can EVEN apply to be a 
> registrar again".

Who said that registrars would be the only ones who would want to stack the
deck?  How would you prove that the fraud originated from any particular
organization?  Who would bear the costs of international investigations into
the backgrounds of each and every voter?  Have you really thought this out? 
Are you volunteering the money (a rather large sum) that this would entail?
 
> Granted - nothing is perfect - and there will always be holes in the 
> process. But, if you can eliminate 85% of the problems and calculate the 
> margin for error - with a STRICT policy of monitoring, and enforcement. 
> There is no reason that a public election could not take place.

But we can't even eliminate 85%, heck we can't even eliminate 20%, especially
in the time frame we have.  There is no way to do strict monitoring, there is
no way to do enforcement.  There is quite simply no reasonable way to hold a
public election on this subject.
 
>>Idealism is nice, but practical reality has to be taken into account.
> 
> I agree that reality needs to be taken into account - but we cannot stop 
> living our lives because there are some bad apples in the bunch. If we as a 
> whole REALLY want something to get done - it will get done. And, we can 
> overcome the obstacles if we put our minds towards the goal of solving the 
> problems.

More idealism, Kendall.  I would really like to see a more practical proposal
if you think this can work.  How will it be funded, where will the funding come
from, how will enforcement investigating be conducted, and by whom?  How will
you verify that each and every vote is indeed a natural person who voted?

You realize this would cost several million dollars to do?

- --
William X. Walsh <william@userfriendly.com>
http://userfriendly.com/
Fax: 877-860-5412 or +1-559-851-9192
GPG/PGP Key at http://userfriendly.com/wwalsh.gpg
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