[Fsfe-ie] perspective on e-voting

[David O'Callaghan]

Dé Luan, 2004-03-01 ag 02:07, scríobh Niall Douglas:
> However, I really do think if people could vote say by mobile phone, 
> you'd get a lot more people voting (even better if the phone asked 
> you for a vote on polling day). So to me, any substantially improved 
> voting system must have this feature. Just replacing paper ballots 
> with an electronic system seems pointless to me - one is spending 
> money for zero gain.

Do you have evidence that mobile phone polls would increase turnout? A
recent study in the UK found that the only measure to increase turnout
was traditional postal voting. I'll see if I can dig up a reference
later...

>  Of course, current mobile phones aren't secure 
> enough and neither will be the next generation. But maybe thereafter 
> given how much they want us to buy stuff using them eg; a distributed 
> self-repairing peer to peer voting network based on all mobiles 
> reaching a consensus (and attacking every mobile phone in the country 
> is a tad hard).

The trust we need to do ecommerce is fundamentally different to the
trust we have in elections. Trustworthy ecommerce transactions *must*
identify the parties involved so that the buyer can get his purchase and
the seller can get his money. Trustworthy evoting transactions *must
not* identify the voter, but still allow the voter to verify that his
vote has been recorded and the election supervisor to verify that each
voter only has one vote. So it's quite possible for a system to be
trustworthy for ecommerce (as you seem to suggest 5G phones will be) but
not suitable for evoting.


David
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