RE: [election-services] Defining a trusted voting process

["Paul Spencer" <paul.spencer@boynings.co.uk>]

Why can a fully digital system not remain truly anonymous? What if a system
produced UUIDs and issued these to voters? A record could be kept of the
UUID (so proving the right to vote) without any record of the voter's ID.

And why should they not be directly verified by citizens? What if the vote
were passed to a vote tallying system (from a different manufacturer from
that of the voting system) and the feedback on how the vote was cast is
provided by this system? If the counting process compares the vote from the
tallying system with that from the voting system, falsification can only
occur by collusion. If you don't trust the counting system, use two (from
different manufacturers).

I think paper is a red herring to placate a few Luddites. Far more important
is the issue of intimidation, which applies to many systems including postal
votes.

EML messaging already supports all of this. What you are looking at is an
architecture. The question is whether it is right to standardise that
internationally, when there are so many different voting methods in use.

Paul Spencer



> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Webber (XML) [mailto:david@drrw.info]
> Sent: 18 February 2005 03:41
> To: election-services@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: Re: [election-services] Defining a trusted voting process
>
>
> Folks,
>
> Received feedback from the Maryland side - so I've
> enhanced the slides a little to do some "scene-setting".
>
> I was kinda assuming the audience was e-vote saavy
> here!
>
> The revised PPT slides are here:
>
>  http://drrw.net/backup/Ballot%20Processing%20Systems.ppt
>
> and the PDF is here:
>
>  http://drrw.net/backup/Ballot-Processing-Systems.pdf
>
> Thanks, DW
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Webber (XML)" <david@drrw.info>
> To: <election-services@lists.oasis-open.org>
> Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2005 5:10 PM
> Subject: [election-services] Defining a trusted voting process
>
>
> > Team,
> >
> > I few weeks back I joined the Maryland True Voting technical
> team here in
> > the USA.
> >
> > Attached PPT is the results of that interaction.
> >
> > It's just a draft right now - but what my aim is here is to understand
> what
> > can
> > make a trusted voting process - where you combine paper and e-Voting
> > together to make use of the best of both worlds.
> >
> > I'm not sure what research has been thrown at this in the past
> - if any -
> > but
> > I just came at this from sound engineering principles in
> building systems.
> >
> > So - I want it to be:
> >
> > 1) simple and obvious
> > 2) doable with off-the-shelf stuff - no fancy patented techniques needed
> > 3) fault tolerant - in that it thwarts all obvious attacks by the nature
> of
> > its
> >     process.
> >
> > Obviously nothing is foolproof - because conspirators could
> > pose as legimate staff and negate the safeguards - but that's a
> > social problem not a software engineering problem!
> >
> > Clearly the level of detail in the PPT is just intended as an overview.
> > If you are going to spec' this out completely - you need to define
> > each mechanism rigorously - and also create lots of XML - but
> > then we are good at that here in OASIS!
> >
> > Thoughts?
> >
> > Thanks, DW
> >
> >
>
>
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