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

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

On Wed, 22 Mar 100, John Charles Broomfield wrote:
> 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.

   I recognize that fraud is a risk in online balloting.  Also, that
registrars and registries might have unfair advantages in campaigning.  

  But it isn't obvious that there would be significant fraud in an
election of the type proposed by ICANN, and maybe a vote for TLDs would
provide a nice way to see how the election would work.  How much could
go wrong?  Would the "wrong" TLD be approved?  This would hardly be the
end of the world even if it happened.

   And, if there was less crime that one could imagine, that would be
interesting too.  

   Recognizing that the ICANN proceedure requires postal addresses,
receipts of both email and postal mail, and a pretty good audit trial to
check, if one was so inclined to check.  

     Jamie

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James Love, Consumer Project on Technology    
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