Side point about secrecy (was: Re: email ballot proposal)

[Jon Bosak <bosak@boethius.eng.sun.com>]

[tallen@sonic.net:]

| 3.  Assumes that email ballots are like mail ballots as described
| 	in R, except that they're not secret (and as R deals mostly
| 	with physical security of secret ballots, regarding
| 	balloting mostly as a means of obtaining secrecy, there's 
| 	not much else left that R describes about them).  See 6.

The old RROR, on the other hand, takes what seems to be the
opposite point of view (p. 200):

   Voting by mail cannot be a secret ballot, as it is necessary
   for the tellers to know by whom each vote is cast.

In this respect, the 1915 RROR seems closer to the spirit of email
voting than the later edition.  It's possible that the advent of
telephones and automobiles made mail balloting less attractive
later in the century, so that it came to be used mainly for voting
for officers using the clean-room techniques described on p. 417
of RRONR rather than for more ordinary decisions.

Jon