[LINK] [UK] Call for e-voting to be scrapped amid security fears

[Rick Welykochy]

Craig Sanders wrote:

> it's taking the votes, which has to be done in real-time while the voter
> is there in the booth (or online), that is the tricky bit.
> 
> and remember, it's all encrypted - so higher CPU utilisation for each
> "page", and no caching (so higher bandwidth).

Ah, now I understand the architecture a bit better. If the votes
*were* cached (encrypted of course) then batches of results could be
sent in a load-sensitive manner at the leisure of the poll
admins. This would alleviate concerns about the work stn itself
being overloaded.

Perhaps it is a mistake to require the evoting stn to keep up
with voter demand and submit the results in (near) real time.
Then again, I am a bit puzzled. Cannot we design a system that
submits, say, one ballot every minute to a central server?
How much data does that entail? Perhaps a few KB per minute?
Am I missing something here?

Anyway, I hope this is rendered academic... we DON'T NEED EVOTING!

> manual counting, as done in australia, has the unbeatable advantage of
> many eyes (from ALL interested parties, rivals and opponents of each
> other) scrutineering the results. you just can't replace that kind of
> audit/security with a bunch of computers and a handful of geeks.

Amen to that. Besides possible bugs in the evoting system that would
mangle the result, it is impossible to prevent that other form of
vote corruption - humans.

I wonder what problem e-voting systems are attempting to solve?

Around the world, vote tallies and results are already available in
a timely manner, some countries/jurisdictions being faster than others.
I doubt e-voting saves much time in the long run. And it certainly
introduces a lack of confidence in the results. The stories coming out
of that great testing vat (the USA) regarding lost / miscounted / invented
votes are legion.

cheers
rickw


-- 
_________________________________
Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services

Any belief that can't stand up to objective scrutiny is hardly worth having.
      -- LJ McIntyre