[governance] Cameroon and Wales collision in TLD space ?????

[Paul Lehto]

Everybody votes the same way essentially with allowances for absentee
voting a slight to moderate exception, but controversial among
election security experts because there's SO MANY vulnerabilities
along the way.

It is hard to hold any election at all simply because, if the issues
are real, literally every voter and every non-voter for that matter
has serious motive to tamper with the election (tax rates affect all,
for example, whether voter or not).  Even worse than banks where
embezzlement is the #1 theft loss, in elections the problem of insider
manipulation (given the free rein for anybody wishing to do so) is so
intense that it exceeds problems banks have.

Example: The vote at home-style convenience "absentee" voting opens
the heretofore closed Pandora's box of voter intimidation and
harassment that was essentially solved by the secret ballot itself.
Prior to the secret ballot, in the USA for example, fights, riots,
intimidation and, yes, murders were an occurrence at every major
election in contested areas, with bosses watching employees, and vote
buyers watching to confirm the votes of vote sellers....

But even worse is internet voting on any Serious issue (I will
stipulate if nobody really has much $ at stake or no serious political
issues at stake, the risk to the election is manageable. But the
military killed (in the USA) internet voting in 2004 after being
advised by a panel, of, yup, experts that internet voting was a noble
idea that simply could not work in practice.  The New York Times
coverage on this is excerpted below.

The Answer is that a physical ballot for all should be provided, with
as little time between ballot issuance and casting, and as little time
between casting and counting as possible.  Preferably the same day
unless circumstances make that impossible.  In the USA state and
federal elections piggyback for cost savings and I'm sure a third
entity, if there was one, could be added.

I could send you my chapter from a book on elections voting systems
that was #1 on amazon.com in Political Parties and the category of
Elections in October 2008 (probably due much more to my fellow
co-authors like Robert F Kennedy Jr than to me).

I've a standing offer for any election official anywhere, or any
vendor for that matter, to publicly debate how they can possibly have
secure elections on computers, given "Reflections on Trusting Trust"
and other basic facts of computer science, not to mention democracy.
So far, no takers. I have sued the vendors and gotten their machines
out, though, so one way or another we engage in a "dialog" of sorts.

The New York Times on military internet voting:

Defense Dept. Cancels Use of Internet Voting Project

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

NEW YORK TIMES

Published: February 5, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/05/politics/campaign/05CND-VOTE.html?hp


Citing security concerns, the Department of Defense canceled the use
of a $22 million project today that would have allowed Americans
overseas to vote over the Internet in this year's elections.

The system, the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment,
or Serve, was developed with financing from the Defense Department.

The decision was announced in a memo from Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz to David Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel
and readiness.

Paraphrasing the memo, a department of defense spokeswoman said "the
department has decided not to use Serve in the November 2004
elections. We made this decision in view of the inability to ensure
legitimacy of votes, thereby bringing into doubt the integrity of the
election results," the spokeswoman said. The memo also states that
efforts will continue to find other ways to cast ballots
electronically for Americans overseas, but "the integrity of the
election results have to be assured," the spokeswoman said.

The decision to cancel the project, which was developed by Accenture,
the consulting and technology services company, was announced two
weeks after members of a panel of scientists who were asked by the
government to assess the project's security recommended that it be
canceled because any system based on off-the-shelf personal computers
and run over today's Internet was inherently insecure.

Aviel D. Rubin, an author of that report, said today that the Serve
project was a noble idea that could not be carried out in a secure way
using today's technology. "While we appreciate their efforts to allow
this segment of the population to have more accessible voting, we
applaud their decision to cancel this project because of the security
concerns, he said.

======================
On 10/19/09, Roland Perry <roland at internetpolicyagency.com> wrote:
> In message <4ADCA72F.3010703 at rkey.com>, at 13:51:43 on Mon, 19 Oct 2009,
> Craig Simon <cls at rkey.com> writes
>>If you folks actually do start discussing scalable online democracy in
>>practical terms, please keep in mind that I've been taking concrete
>>steps on this.
>
> How do the majority of people, without Internet access, participate in
> such a vote? That's not intended to be a "smart question", by the way;
> just a recognition that democracy should be inclusive.
> --
> Roland Perry
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-- 
Paul R Lehto, J.D.
P.O. Box #1
Ishpeming, MI  49849
lehto.paul at gmail.com
906-204-4026
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