Posts by Matthew Poole
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Resistance to online voting does not seem like a viable long-term proposition - for political, not technical reasons.
Sadly, I think that people will sacrifice the surety of our current system for the convenience (as in blatant laziness, not assistance of the disabled) of electronic voting. One of the few things (that used to be) in the US school curriculum that I wish we had is civics. We do far too little to teach children about why democracy is important, our rights, the structure of governance (Commercial Law 101 at U.Auck does a once-over-lightly of NZ's civic structure, as an introduction to the law and how it's passed, and from what I heard in my tutorials some students who were born here have no idea about the three arms or any of those other fundamentals), etc. Fitzgerald v Muldoon should be required knowledge for every person who leaves high school in this country!
Without the knowledge of how the system works, it's impossible to get people to care about ensuring it continues to work.
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50% of me is horribly offended!
You had the sense to leave!
Seriously, I don't understand Americans who wail about how many things they have to vote for at every election. It's the way you do it, if you don't like it have it changed. I'd rate the election of central government as of such importance as to be worthy of its own day. Vote on the dog catcher and sheriff and the ordinance on dogs crapping on the pavement some other time.
That probably also has a significant impact on voter turnout. When you spend an hour at the polling station ticking boxes, every two years, it's hardly a process that's going to get the apathetic champing at the bit. -
Israel conducted a 100-aircraft dry run of an attack on Iran over the Mediterranean two weeks ago.
Wasn't it a drill for long-distance operations, as opposed to some firm plan for attacking Iran? Not that the two are exactly distinguishable at this stage (Israel's only long-distance target right now is Iran, after all), but to be thoroughly pedantic and all.
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One of the interesting things about Obama is the way that he's leveraged the internet and raised at least half his money from small donors - meaning he's much less beholding to big money than any recent candidate has been.
He also resolutely refuses to take money from lobbyists. I came across a blog post a few weeks ago from a person who's registered as a DC lobbyist and sent a cheque to the Obama campaign for $100 or thereabouts. It was returned with a polite letter saying thanks but we won't take money from lobbyists. She (I think it was a she) was almost ecstatic in reporting this, because it affirmed her faith in the honesty of Obama's campaign over its pledge not to be bought by lobbyists.
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Matthew, my concern around secrecy for internet is not so much in the "transmission" of the vote (I imagine that has technical solutions) but in someone watching you (and therefore possibly coercing you to) cast that vote on your screen - but this same concern applies for postal votes. My wife could have watched me tick the box on a paper ballot just as she could see me do it on a screen.
You're right, there are extremely good technical solutions to the security of the ballot in transit and quite good ones for the ballot in situ.
The problem of someone watching you is harder to address, but the proposal is that ballots could be reviewed and re-cast at any point until the close of polling. So if thug hubby watches over wifey's shoulder to ensure she votes "proper", wifey could at some future point get away from his scrutiny and change her vote. Which, unlike local body, is possible as proposed. Local body votes are set once the envelope is sealed.Interesting that votes can currently be traced back to a voter though? That's a MUCH bigger concern than mine...
As I said, it's non-trivial and cannot be done secretly. It requires the ballot papers, and the voter books, and it permanently alters both of them because the serial number is obscured initially.
It's essential to deal with fraud. If an electorate has five polling stations and someone votes at all of them, and then the vote is by a margin of four, how do you achieve a valid result? You need a way to determine which of the ballots shouldn't be in there. That's why the possibility exists. -
Perhaps burying the Iran story is because they know it's saber rattling? I'm fairly certain that if the Israeli armed forces were actually "secretly" planning a strike, it wouldn't be all over the Associated Press.
When it comes to the Israelis, never underestimate how far they'll go. They bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor, remember. They adhere closely to "The best defence is a good offence."
The US needs to tell them to pull their collective head in, which of course won't happen. If Israel does bomb Iran, it will get ugly. Iran will, rightly, treat it as an act of war. They'll almost certainly retaliate. Israel has nuclear weapons. Iran doesn't, but it quite likely has other WMDs. If Israel uses a tactical nuke, which I've seen suggested, Iran will probably respond in kind. Or Israel will discover that it's covered by millions of extremely angry Muslims. Both possibilities are likely.If we think that USD140 oil is painful, wait until it breaks USD200 on the back of Iran shutting off its supply to the world, possibly backed up by other Islamic OPEC members. I wish you were right about it being sabre rattling, and if it were anyone other than Israel I'd be inclined to agree with you, but because it's Israel it's very hard to rule out the possibility that it'll happen.
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Here's an example of APN's new-era of sub-editing, from the lead story on the current front page of the Herald's website.
The Herald's great for fuck-ups by subs. I've got a couple of favourites.
One was this, and another was here in the coverage of the '06 blackout of Auckland where it was claimed that "Trains stopped stranding hundreds of commuters..." (bottom of the first page) My, how public transport in this city has improved!
A friend saw "Rifles to carry rifles" in an article about the police arming themselves. The screen-cap proof is on my computer at home. -
So what's the argument behind a central government vote being absolutely super secret while a local government one can be handled through the post?
In a way that makes the local gummint ballot more secret, because unless the mail clearing person sees you drop your ballot into the post box, knows you, and opens the envelope (rendering your ballot spoiled, in any case), it's just one more ballot in a pile of tens-of-thousands. There aren't that many votes cast at any polling station in the general election.
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Although I suppose the definition of secret ballot would come into play (e.g. does it simply mean it can't be traced after it's made?)
We don't have that now. Every ballot has a unique serial number, and it's possible to track who voted how by way of that number. It's distinctly non-trivial, as it means revealing the serial number of every voter and ballot until you find the match you're after, but it can be done.
My suggested system, involving a random time delay in hand-off between authentication and voting systems would achieve a similar level of secrecy. It would be theoretically possible to establish how someone voted, but doing so would be very involved because you'd have to correlate a voter's electorate with the votes cast at a similar point in time. -
Counting pieces of paper is easy to conceptualise; public key cyptography is not.
That's why I don't think the assurances that we can provide for an electronic system are nearly as transparent for the general public as the assurances in a scrutineered manual system. That's the rub for me - public faith in it.
I happen to agree with you. Many voters think that "Internet Explorer"=="the Internet". They don't know, and don't want to know, about verified hardware and hashes and all the other things that can be done to ensure that a system is running what it's meant to be running. This is actually a situation where TPM would be perfect, for the assurance of the hardware, but it's way over the heads of Jo(e) Voter.
If it wasn't for the assistance to the disabled, I'd say that e-voting was an entirely pointless exercise in expense and fallibility. If there's a way that these groups can be enfranchised without having to go e-voting all the way, I'll support it to the hilt. I find it mildly unsettling that there are people whose choices are to not vote, or to tell someone else how they want their vote to be cast - and for the blind, they have no assurance that what they want is what was done! They're not a huge portion of the electorate, sure, but that doesn't make their votes any less worthy of the secrecy that the rest of us take for granted.