[Fsfe-ie] perspective on e-voting

[Ian Clarke]

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Niall Douglas wrote:
| Voting is not like a bank vault where if you break it you win
| outright - at best, you get four years or so of power.

Dangerously optimistic.  If someone has the capability to rig an
election before they get into office, then they will definitely be able
to rig it again once they are in office, and each time they do, it will
be exponentially more difficult to undo.

Your claim that the media will act as a self-correcting mechanism is,
again, dangerously optimistic.  In the US (where I lived until very
recently), not one of the mainstream TV stations raised or raise the
obvious questions about why GWB is the US President when we now know
that if the count hadn't been stopped, he would have lost.  In the next
election, whether he wins or loses, the manner in which he won the
previous election will not be an issue for the vast majority of Americans.

Rigging an election is the political equivalent of someone getting root
on your server.  You must assume that your democracy/server will remain
compromised until you do a ground-up reinstall / have a revolution.  It
is extremely difficult to unpick such a compromise piece by piece.

This is why it is so essential to ensure that it does not happen in the
first place.

Ian.
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