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

[Craig Simon]

To be clear, where formal public law-making and officer-selecting 
elections are concerned, I'm not an advocate of Internet voting in 
particular, or of electronic voting in general. I agree with those who 
argue that a system of physically auditable records marked by the voter 
in a secret manner (which we might call the "Hard Australian Ballot") 
promises a far more legitimate account of voter desires.

The problem I've set out to solve is how to best leverage the web as a 
venue for open debate and democratically-organized preference ordering. 
Since I'm inspired by concepts such as Town Halls, public caucuses, 
Indabas, and IETF Working Groups, there's no pretense of trying to keep 
participant identity secret.

By putting aside (for now) the daunting but critical challenge of 
pristine legitimacy, it's possible to address other important ones... 
namely, how to facilitate a style of mass, diversified participation 
that can effectively build consensus around valuable ideas.

My view of politics is that it's about managed competition. It's a way 
to allow formal articulation of demands and expectations, and to allow 
pursuit of those interests in ways that establish rights and 
obligations. It's a way of picking winners without resort to war. The 
tool I'm trying to create would allow for massively scalable 
articulation of demands and expectations through a technical strategy I 
call coalescent bubbling.

I like to think I've thought of a way to structure a venue that can 
avoid being paralyzed by "noisy idiots" without silencing them. I also 
believe I've figured out how to prevent a debate from being overwhelmed 
by "silly swarms" and "organized interests." The key is to take them 
seriously and allow them to put their best foot forward.

But those feature have yet to be demonstrated, So far, all I've been 
able to demonstrate is how to construct an interactive ranked-choice 
ballot and integrate it with a rich real-time visualization of results.


Paul Lehto wrote:
> 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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> 
> 
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