evoting [was: RE: [LINK] Aussies: prosecute hackers as terrorists]

[Jan Whitaker]

At 01:12 PM 2/03/01 +1100, Grant Bayley wrote:
>In hindsight, agreed.  As one other user said, the fact that they were
>able to submit multiple times and skew the result should say enough...

I must share a story on multiple voting, since it's come up here and with 
regard to electronic voting in general re elections etc.

I'm on a greyhound [dog] discussion list where the availability of a 
'favorite dog' competition has been identified.  Well, needless to say, the 
net savvy have got the group going to vote 'often' on the site to make sure 
the greys outdo the dachsies in the hound category.  The latest story is 
the telling part.  One of the members of the greys group received an email 
from the person running the contest at Discovery Animal Planet site, 
accusing the member of setting up a voting program!  Well, that set the cat 
amongst the pigeons!  The person accused got mad.  One of the other list 
members tore into Discovery [nicely, but firmly] about how they set 
themselves up with a multi-vote potential, and that a list of 2400 people 
entering multiple votes each day would automatically result in the 
thousands of votes that are appearing.  People were also wondering why the 
actual counts were verying from day to day - subsequent days counts being 
lower than previous days - were the organisers vote dumping?

 From a list member:
"I'm thoroughly sickened by the fact that they removed the greyhounds from the
voting poll. This reeks of the Bush/Gore election. <sigh>"

The last I read about the matter was that the greyhound breed had been 
totally removed from the available categories, which has unleashed [excuse 
the pun] another raft of uproar.  Someone has mentioned there is a manual 
method ??? maybe a writein, which drew this comment:

"Let's wear those little wienies out - keep voting! (We have 4 computers
in our house and all of us have been voting!)"

Then this:
"Not only have they knocked the greyhounds out, they have totally started =
the vote over. They've knocked out all the votes for all the hounds. If =
I was Dachsunds, I would be just as steamed! "

And now the list has decided to have a direct letter writing campaign to 
the viewer services department - power to the pet people!

Not sure there's a lesson in this, but an interesting anecdote from a 
'general public' type of area rather than the IT techheads one would find 
on ZDNet.

Jan
JLWhitaker Associates
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit@primenet.com  --  http://www.primenet.com/~jwhit/whitentr.htm