[LINK] Fwd: vip-l: Electronic voting

[Stewart Fist]

Personally, I am quite happy to whole-heartedly embrace electronic voting
(even over the Internet), when they can demonstrate unequivocally that the
system is fair, available to everyone, and unbreakable.

My judgement that they had demonstrated this facility would be based (at
least partly) on the supposition that ATMs were totally secure, reliable and
unbreakable; and that identity theft was no longer a problem in Australia
and America.

The financial and intellectual resources that Australia and America have to
put into solving these two major problems would be tens-of-thousands of
times any money a Federal Government would be willing to put into tracking
electoral fraud  -- so we should expect that these closely-related problems
would be solved first.



It's the same with nuclear energy.  I'm quite happy to support nuclear
power-stations, if they are economical in the total-cost sense.

All I ask is that the problems of waste-disposal, environmental and
occupational health, weapon proliferation, terrorism, etc. etc. have been
solved first and costed into the calculations -- or at least reduced to a
manageable level in the event of failure.

Until then, I advocate the 'precautionary principle'.