SF ACM Wed. -- Prof. David L. Dill on "The Battle for Accountable Voting Systems"

Thu Feb 19 18:59:14 PST 2004

Quoting jimd at starshine.org (jimd at starshine.org):
> On Tue, Feb 17, 2004 at 03:09:30PM -0800, David Wolfskill wrote:
> > Some of you may already have seen the blurb, and I'm rather reluctant to
> > spam the list (for various reasons), but here's an excerpt for those who
> > may not have seen/noted it.
>  
> > I believe it's relevant to sysadmins because reliability of the computer
> > systems in question lies at (or very close to) the heart of the matter,
> > and as sysadmins, we tend to be rather more familiar with such issues
> > than most.  :-{
> 
>  Not just reliability but also security!  There's always been voting
>  fraud and manipulation (including Jerry-mandering, and various forms
>  of subtle polling place intimidation.

Gerrymandering.  From Mass Governor Gerry
http://90.1911encyclopedia.org/G/GE/GERRYMANDER.ht  m

>  However, computing technology in voting would be an irresistable target
>  potentially allowing the attacker to swing any vote any way!  I will
>  probably never trust a voting system that could be deployed by our
>  bureaucracy!

I don't trust closed source on this; I certainly don't trust it from
a company whose leader has ties to a party (any party):
    O'Dell, in a fundraising letter on August 14th,
    committed "to helping Ohio deliver its electoral
    votes to the president next year" according to
    the Associated Press
(many sources, you have google, use it).

I think computer aided voting CAN be done well, security and verifiably.
If that means that the computer aids me and prints out a card with my
vote (barcoded would be fine).

Verification/audits can be done by checking the votes against what
the computer offers from its memory.  If it has printed 200 votes
for Buchanan and has stored 1705, then the machine is deeply suspect :)

I'll pass on comments about Repumocrats and lack of actual choices.
That's for another forum.