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

[John Charles Broomfield <jbroom@manta.outremer.com>]

> 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?
(...)
> 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.
> 
> Should we stop the entire democratic process - or stop trying to prevent 
> abuse from the few rotten apples who continually spoil everything for 
> everyone? 
(...)

With a real-person paper ballot type vote, and taking as a given that the
oversight is correct (ie that the counting is not tainted and that the
ballot-boxes are not tampered etc...), the chances of voter fraud are really
very low. In a state like Arizona, having a bunch of people go to three
ballot boxes and deposit one vote in each, or manage to sign up and prove
from a national census that they have 3-4 different addresses and then vote
from each one is something that for all practical effects DOESN'T matter.
How many fraudulent votes can one voter cast in a single day? 10? How many
total votes are tallied? a few hundred thousand. Can this one person
automate their fraud to vote 100 times? The answer is no because traditional
voting requires them to actually turn up at the ballot box to cast their
vote (mail voting is a very small minority traditionally). In other words,
once you make everyone go out of their way to hand-in in person a piece of
paper, fraud on a relative scale becomes irrelevant.

Unfortunately, for quite a few years now, we have all been wondering how to
actually have an online voting system which can be used in a wide way and
which can be held accountable. On the online world, with some degree of
programming, you CAN create a miriad of email addresses and then proceed to
send votes in automatically from all of them.

In a state election, one person on his own cannot send in 1 million ballots.
In an online vote, one person on his own CAN manage to send in 1 million
votes unless we have some outside heavy method to authenticate them BEFORE
the ballot. Without this prior authentication, votes can be hijacked. More
so if we're talking about a system with many many voters where you can't
detect this fraud just by having a quick look at the votes.

That is the problem that William highlights and that you seem to not
realize.

Yours, John Broomfield.