E-Voting Undermines Public Confidence In Elections 155
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Techdirt columnist, Timothy Lee, hit the metaphoric nail on the head, claiming that e-Voting undermines the public perception of election fairness - even when there is no evidence of wrongdoing. 'In a well-designed voting system, voters shouldn't have to take anyone's actions on faith. The entire process should be simple and transparent, so that anyone can observe it and verify that it was carried out correctly. The complexity and opacity of e-voting machines makes effective public scrutiny impossible, and so it's a bad idea even in the absence of specific evidence of wrongdoing.' Add to this the possibility technical faults, conflicts of interest and evidence of tampering, how long before the US vote is viewed as an electronic pantomime?"
That's the plan (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:That's the plan (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The answer is:
1) To make peoples votes public information so everyone can see them immediately, know where everyone stands, and know if the votes were tampered with.
2) To allow them to directly vote on each issue if
Cyberyn & South American Direct Democracy? (Score:2)
You may be interested in Chile's early 70s project, Cyberyn [wikipedia.org]. It was a central nervous system for a planned economy. (I know you, not your favorite concept, but keep an open mind
Re:That's the plan (Score:5, Insightful)
"The answer is:" - To fully understand why it's been practically impossible to rig an election in places such as the UK and Australia for well over a century now.
E-voting seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to the 2000 election but before re-inventing democratic elections a second time in a single decade please take a look at the existing designs that have withstood the test of time and two world wars.
Party politics at the simplest level is two or more people who agree with each other. Too many parties and you end up changing governments more often than underwear (re: Italy), not enough and you end up with no genuine choice (re: US).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There is no reason to assume that a direct democracy isn't going to have legal structures to prevent violence just like every other political structure. So what, are you putting forward that only representative democracies are able to do this
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Historically, that was true. It was possible for a person to intimidate another person with absolutely no evidence.
That is now preventable through technological means in ways that were not possible before.
Therefore, what was once not practical for the reasons you describe is now something that can be considered anew, with consideration given to how those systemic liabilities can be overco
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Ummm. Hmmmm. Gotta be 4 or 5 years ago by now.
Public Confidence? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Politicking seems to have su
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Becoming a state representative would be in the realm of about $10,000-$50,
Re: (Score:2)
Assuming tthey actually serve the interests of the office. As opposed to the interests of some lobby group or even just their own interests.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
How long? (Score:3, Funny)
I thought that ship had already sailed...
Re: (Score:2)
This is actually quite serious stuff. If the population loses faith in the process used to collect the votes you have the situation brewing in Kenya now or the situation that befel Algeria some years ago and tunred it into the current basket case.
e-voting or not (Score:2, Funny)
Let's extend that a bit (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Let's extend that a bit (Score:5, Insightful)
100% accuracy isn't necessary (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think a well designed voting should necessarily have to be 100% accurate. A hand-counting system isn't that accurate, but it can still be trusted as long as there aren't barriers from people being involved in the process
Transparency (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Transparency (Score:4, Informative)
Another part of the problem is that most existing implementations are - frankly - crap. They offer minimal security, have frequently been reported as having errors such as non-zero counts, have poor reliability, provide minimal accountability and often provide no means of verification. This is wholly unacceptable. Nobody would accept that from a cash register in a supermarket, never mind a system that is mission-critical in a democracy.
Hand-counts can be reliable. For the longest time, the British system was entirely done by hand-counting, with very small error rates for a population of 60 million. The American system includes machine counts, statistical sampling, and other mechanisms for speeding up the returns, with different States using different methods. It is also worrying that the first returns are announced prior to the polls closing on the west coast, which will inevitably introduce bias and strategic voting. The British system isn't perfect, and has recently developed all kinds of flaws and fraudulant practices, but it can be used as a yardstick of what a democracy should minimally achieve.
Of course, a democracy has other dependencies. It's only meaningful if enough of the population votes for the votes to truly represent the population. The electoral college has the potential for distorting the consensus of the people and probably has. There is no ballot option to reject all candidates and re-open nominations. Media saturation and candidate funding warp awareness. The educational system isn't up to the standards needed to ensure the population have the breadth or depth of knowledge to understand the complexities of a nation or avoid the wiles of a skilled talker. If these flaws remain, then even a perfect voting system can never represent what the public actually want or need, which is what a democracy is about. Being heard has no meaning if you never learned how to talk.
To me, the question shouldn't merely be how we reliably count votes, but should also include how we reliably cast them. There may be no better solution than the one we have, I accept that, but I won't accept that this is known until it actually is.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It can, and then the very small fraction of the population that is capable of understanding the security properties of cryptographic protocols will be convinced that the election was legit if they personally act as election observers (through the audit mechanism included in this well-designed e-voting system).
There's a problem though: One of the properties that any voting system should have is that *all voters* should
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Absolutely. If math education were fixed to the point where most people could understand RSA and catch the flaw in an intentionally fraudulent 99% error margin calculation then we'd have a radically different situation on our hands.
Unfortunately, for the moment, we're stuck with the voting population that we have - utter incompetence
Re: (Score:2)
The average voter really doesn't care... and is usually ignorant of mathematical processes. Yes, they have to rely upon a somewhat complicated mathematical
Re: (Score:2)
No, it shouldn't. If we're going to claim to have a democracy, all the voters should be equally able to personally understand that their vote is trustworthy. Having only a small elite that understands the voting system and requiring everyone else to accept their word simply isn't democratic (and I say that even when I personally am a member of the proposed "small elite").
And it's a very small elite who are ac
Re: (Score:2)
My criticisms apply to all the cryptographic protocols that I've seen and to any of the straightforward variants that haven't been explicitly described - including the systems described in the PDF and video that you linked to.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That would have been a nightmare of having to deal with lawsuits based on different issues for all 50 states simultaneously... and to get all of them resolved and de
Sure, the polls might say so... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Not one voter requested the paper ballot option.
As a second observation, in all three elections the county ran a 100% audit, comparing the output of
i've been saying this for weeks (Score:5, Interesting)
it's electronic voting
http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=413698&no_d2=1&cid=21986758 [slashdot.org]
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=409654&cid=21950000 [slashdot.org]
democracy has plenty of problems, but one of democracy's greatest strengths is that by making the citizens it rules a part of the process, it inspires confidence in the government, it instills legitimacy
if you make the voting process opaque, you destroy confidence, you destroy legitimacy, you weaken people's faith in their democratically elected government, out of bad perception that their part in the process has been messed with, hidden
electronic voting must be universally rejected in all ways and all levels of government, asap
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Like an earlier poster insightfully mentioned, people are also distrusted when the measurable effect in an election is close to or below the error margin. This is because the error margin when paper ballots are counted by people is not 0%. Making citizens a part of the process only "instills legitimacy" when those citizens are fu
i wish to make an example of you (Score:5, Insightful)
Making citizens a part of the process only "instills legitimacy" when those citizens are fully competent, and the majority simply aren't.
i want you to look at and consider you fellow citizens, your fellow human beings. if, when you look at those people, you find something lacking, something untrustworthy, this is an antidemocratic instinct
the full inference of the comment of the man above is that there is the unworthy, a magical cut off line (which no one can determine, but that's besides the point), and then a special higher class of worthy people
this is a story as old as time. it's called aristocracy. it's called classism. it can be based on an arbitrary test for intelligence, a certain amount of money in your bank account, a certain genetic makeup
but the end results of aristocracy and classism is all the same: the french revolution
if you find yourself with antidemocratic instincts like the poster above, take a deep breath, step back, and fix yourself. you are broken in a dangerous, authoritarian, fascist way
you fellow human beings are your fellow human beings. beginning and end of story. you are no better than them. if you think you are, and there is a special class of people who share this superiority with you, you are a danger to society. YOU and your thinking is the seed to the downfall of democracy. and it is the same fear based pap that you often howl about coming from the right
Re: (Score:2)
you fellow human beings are your fellow human beings. beginning and end of story. you are no better than them. if you think you are, and there is a special class of people who share this superiority with you, you are a danger to society. YOU and your thinking is the seed to the downfall of democracy. and it is the same fear based pap that you often howl about coming from the right
I strongly believe many citizen are unfit to vote. As I am sure many do. But everyone has his own standard to define who is unfit, and none are democratically correct.
In the same way we prefer innocent until proven guilty, we prefer fit until proven unfit. Therefore everyone should be allowed to vote.
it is not possible (Score:2)
kudos
Re: (Score:2)
This is true. Democracy is overrated. Do you really think a nation is best steered by hoardes/mobs of couch potatoes? It is not.
a nation steered by hoardes/mobs of couch potatoes (Score:3, Insightful)
in other words, a nation steered by hoardes/mobs of couch potatoes absolutely sucks
and yet every single other option you can think of is yet worse
scratches head (Score:2)
and i'm the nut
huh
Re: (Score:2)
Rejecting electronic voting shouldn't make you trust the system if you didn't before, unless you thought that electronic voting was the only possible source of error in the process.
Concerning "fairness," paper voting and electronic voting
electronic voting (Score:2)
you can tamper with paper votes, but it is cumbersome, slow, small in scale, and hard to hide, and requires the coordination of a conspiracy
on the other hand with electronic voting (and to a lesser extent mechanical voting), you have an order of magnitude more attack vectors. you can also do a lot more damage with the slightest of effort, quickly, with a lot of volatility and potential for permanent obfuscation, destruction, or scrambling and outr
Re: (Score:2)
The issue here is that YOU (not me) are writing off e-voting because it is easier to compromise. Easier, sure, but only *easier* (not possible as opposed to impossible). I, on the other hand, either have enough trust (or don't care enough, whicheve
your question is easy to answer (Score:3, Insightful)
however, there is no one out there who can accurately measure those qualities in any trustworthy way
therefore, you have no choice other than to start looking at people as equals, and let things fall as they may. proof by outcome of life. no test can test for the qualities that are important in leading, for example. the only honest way to look at your fellow human being is as an equal. there is no mag
Re: (Score:2)
E-Voting Undermines ... Elections (Score:2)
E-Voting Undermines Elections.
Now having said that... Electronic tabulation (by optical scan for example) of paper ballots, accompanied by statistically appropriate manual audits, would inspire happy confidence in this voter.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think electronic voting necessarily means opacity.
it does (Score:2)
oh but it does, by definition. inseparably
anything on a computer is opaque. a disk drive has to be read, a processor has to cycle, a monitor has to project. something on paper meanwhile, requires nothing but a human being to understand what is written on it
eletronic voting is most definitely opaque. all of interaction with computers is an opaque process as compared to paper based media. paper is obviously inferior in many more important ways than el
Re: (Score:2)
The same can be done with computers. When I return a defective item to the store, I can prove to the store that I purchased it from them. In some cases, even if they lost their copy of the record of the transaction.
with your paper receipt? (Score:4, Funny)
Paper trail (Score:2)
how long? like, maybe 2000? (Score:2)
Conceited E-Voting Vendors (Score:3, Insightful)
Especially if the metal cabinets were aged in the factory with a little rust and scrapes...
But the vendors are used to scoring sales by just keeping the purchase procedure as closed as the IP in their opaque devices. The user themself doesn't figure into their business model at all, whether they're casting a vote or reading about the purchase on their behalf in their newspaper.
Re: (Score:2)
In fact, using the traditional red handle and candidate levers might actually be an improvement over some of the variations of voting machines I've seen... at least in terms of a reasonable user interface.
Re: (Score:2)
Scantron (Score:5, Insightful)
I prefer voting on those than the touch screen units. Especially when I have to wait 20-30 min to get my time to vote, and I am in a relatively small voting district now. When I was in a larger district it was a 1-5 min wait to get you ballot, and a 1-5 min wait to scan in at one of the two machines.
I also find that older folk are afraid of touch screen technology because they feel that it will break, or they are not comfortable with computers to start with.
Let me just sharpen my #2 pencil and vote!
Phil
Re:Scantron (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a teacher, and I give scantron tests once in a while. They're extremely error-prone. If you don't fill in the space completely, or if you try to erase and change your answer, it will often grade it wrong, i.e., someone looking at it would say that the student probably intended B, but the machine scored it as D or something. I've been told that the error rates are lower on a carefully calibrated and maintained machine, but ... then we just have to sit around wondering whether Florida went the wrong way because a certain district didn't maintain their scantron machines properly.
I'd be happy with any system that let me have a printout to take home. I could verify that it really recorded my vote the way I thought. I know there's the argument that this makes it possible to buy people's votes, because the buyer can verify that the seller really voted as he was paid to do. But in fact it's already trivial to buy votes: get the person you're bribing to vote absentee. Voter fraud is one of these silly Republican vote-getting issues (like flag burning) that is a total non-issue in reality. For that matter, let's just do all voting by mail. It's the 21st century, and I don't see any rational reason to make a busy person go to a particular place on a weekday in order to transmit 67 bits of information.
Re: (Score:2)
Why increase absentee voting? (Score:2)
Solution already exists -- machine rejection (Score:4, Interesting)
This at least gets rid of the over-votes, and could get rid of the under-votes if the Scantron has a "possibly read a filled bubble but not sure" threshold (I really don't know).
One interesting tidbit from the 2000 Florida election that often gets ignored in favor of controversies over the felon lists and the nature of the butterfly ballots themselves, is that the machines they used were in fact capable of this! It was an optional setting, the machine could either take the bad ballot as-is but just not count it, or it could reject the ballot back into the voter's hand for correction. As you may have guessed, voting machines in the precincts with high rates of bad ballots had this option disabled, and ones with low rates of bad ballots had it enabled. But we weren't told that, and were instead just left to assume that the people in the high-error precincts were simply dumber than everyone else, and we just accepted it! But in reality, errors are common, but most get a chance to correct it when the machine spits it out.
That said, I do agree that the best thing to do is have the computer print out the ballot so as to minimize the possibility of error. It's really the best of both worlds: The accessability of a voting machine that lets you edit your choices, read more about propositions, and enforces rules like no over-votes, but you still get a human-readable paper ballot that serves as the vote of record and can be recounted by anyone with working eyes. And if you make the printed ballot machine readable -- I prefer an OCR-friendly font so it's the *same* markings that are both human and machine readable -- you can still use a machine counter to get your instant-gratification.
It's not that hard to design a working voting system that minimizes voter error, maximizes accessibility, and most importantly maximizes openness and transparency. Just... nobody that I can tell has actually come forward and put the pieces together in a real system intended to be sold.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
nobody that I can tell has actually come forward and put the pieces together in a real system intended to be sold.
There are probably reasons for this and a few come to mind fairly readily. First, the potential market for these machines is somewhat small and relatively fixed (i.e. it is a niche, a larger one perhaps, but still a niche). Second, the voting hardware has to maintain a high degree of accuracy and quality. For example, it will be made of quality materials and provable micro-programming with good documentation and easy configuration. All of these things would make the products expen$ive, at least to buy, and
Re: (Score:2)
now (Score:2)
See, these days, they don't even have to have the appearance of propriety. Witness Dick Cheney giving his Halliburton shares to charity when he became VP...or did he?
Perceptions are grounded in reality (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Quite right. The requirement for voting systems is not "absence of evidence of wrongdoing." What is actually required is "evidence of absence of wrongdoing." And, that evidence of absence must be fully convincing to the great majority of average people who have absolutely no technical understanding beyond basic arithmetic. If "evidence of absence of wrongdoing" is not obvious, we should reasonably infer that wrongdoing (as, election rigging) has taken place.
The only way to produce the required evidenc
They say this like it helps... (Score:4, Insightful)
And the answer is so simple.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In a way, confidence is what is most important (Score:5, Interesting)
The purpose of elections in a republic is NOT because there's something "right" or "nice" about selecting the government officials and rules that are preferred by a majority of the voting population. (In fact, sometimes that's actually a bad idea. "Democracy" is often three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.)
The purpose of elections is to increase the stability of the country and pacify it internally. They do this by attempting to figure out which way the war would come out, if it were actually fought over the issue.
To do this, elections must convince the losing side that they can't reverse the result by resorting to force.
That means they don't have to be perfect - but they have to be convincingly good enough.
- A wide race will be convincing. If the exact numbers are off it doesn't really matter.
- A really close race may come out wrong. But if it's close it also means a war won't reverse the result: Too many additional people will get annoyed and oppose those who try the violent option. So the losers might exhaust the peaceable remedies: Recounts, courts, etc. Then they gripe about it non-stop until the next election. And EVERYBODY tries to fix the system to be more accurate and avoid this hassle next time. Repeat until the elections are believable and/or the margin is broad enough that there's no serious dispute.
But the easiest way for an election to be believably fair and honest is for it to be VISIBLY fair and honest. Count the votes behind locked doors or inside a software-driven black box and you substitute trust for visible honesty.
Once the people stop trusting the elections their stabilizing effect is gone. Then losers may think they are strong enough to reverse the result and (when the winners start doing things that hurt their interests) morally justified in making the attempt. Then you are just asking for civil "unrest", comities of vigilance, death squads, coups, and civil or revolutionary war.
So it's far more important that the election procedures be VISIBLY honest and their approximate accuracy known than that they be dead-on accurate.
Which is what we're seeing now. Computerized black-box voting killed the audit trail and enabled the possibility that a small number of people could introduce large and undetectable changes to the result. Then came a close election with important issues at stake. Regardless of whether the black boxes gave an accurate count or were corrupted, there was no way to SHOW they were right - or close enough not to matter. So the losers were unconvinced.
Repeat after four years, and again after eight, adding in a foreign war, massive government spending, "security" intrusions on civil rights, and attempts by media conglomerates to swing the election exposed by comparison to uncontrolled Internet communication. Now you're starting to approach a scenario where large groups of losers start thinking "Maybe the elections were stolen. Maybe we've been conquered. Maybe there are enough of us to reverse this. Maybe violence will work. Maybe the system is corrupted to the point that violence is the only answer. Maybe violence is PROPER."
This is WHY it is more important that the elections be VISIBLY, CONVINCINGLY accurate than that they just be accurate.
Re: (Score:2)
If you think back to the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, one of the huge problems was that Al Gore originally conceded the election, then tried to "take back" his concession. Ignoring all of the minor squabbling in Florida and the embarrassing U.S. Supreme Court case that set an unconstitutional precedent, the real problem in that election was an issue of very close results
it's not just E-voting (Score:2)
Some of that is funny to me, because the framework for vote allocation (winner takes all) and gerrymandering are pretty big hacks on the wishes of the people.
Nevertheless, I think there will be
Vote Counting Doesn't Belong at the Booth (Score:3, Interesting)
Electronic vote counting simply doesn't belong at the voting booth.
Instead, what should happen at the voting booth should be ballot preparation, not vote counting. I have absolutely no problem with a fancy machine that has cool graphics and touch screen voting options in a thousand different languages. If you want to go through the effort of putting that together for a somewhat reasonable price, knock your socks off. I don't even mind this end of it being completely closed and propritary.
But the vote counting part needs to be separated from the ballot preparation. The only thing all of this fancy hardware is really doing is to assist a voter in understanding the rules of the election. In other words, not vote for multiple people if multiple votes invalidate your ballot, remind you of races that you didn't vote in, allow you to clearly note who you are voting for (no missing chads or fuzzy and inconclusive ballots), and provide a very clean ballot that election judges can use later for the vote counting process. Ballots cast should be on some sort of physical medium that has irreversible marks (so an election judge can't modify the results afterward) and human readable so the voter can have clear confidence in how their vote was cast. Any computer scientist worthy of that title ought to be able to figure out how to make something simultaneously human and machine readable... we aren't talking rocket science here and this is a decades old solved problem in the field.
One of my largest problems with the Diebold machines is that they have the vote counting take place in the voting booth itself. This opens up not only the traditional forms of voting fraud, but it also opens up new vectors of attacking the system and requires far too much in the way of securing the machines in order to ensure the integrity of the data. Besides, most of the security protocols aren't followed anyway, and those that are followed are a joke in many cases and have multiple methods of being circumvented. By its very nature at least in America, voting is done in private and away from the eyes of election judges. This is also done to ensure the integrity of the vote cast (by stopping coercion). But this act, by its nature, means that the machines can be compromised during the act of voting itself.
Let's look at what problems these machines are trying to solve:
Re: (Score:2)
I know people from Oregon would strongly disagree with me on this point (they have mail-in ballots that have been used for several years now), but that still doesn't change my mind on the topic or concern me about legitimate issues of voter fraud that a central voting location can help combat.
The issues of voting over the internet involve all of
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You can't say that in the USA. Rigged elections are incredibly commonplace... with it being an "open secret" that dead people voting in Chicago gave JFK the U.S. Presidency over Nixon. This is the land where "vote early and vote often" is an often heard mantra.
With illegal aliens voting and homeless people in Seattle turning out in record numbers (in fact... having more vo
Re: (Score:2)
Hang on...how exactly do you have people voting that aren't on the electoral roll? Why are they allowed in if they've not had their name ticked off? Dodgy staff at the polling place?
You need more accountability in the process. Apart from having electoral officials sign everything (inital each ballot that goes out, sign the seals on the ballot boxes, etc.), what can a shady character do if representatives from each candidate are watching the process?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, I see. Over my way you have to register either before or very soon after (recently set to 8pm on the same day) the election is called, so you can't just put your registration form in on the day. The electoral commission comes out to schools, so most everyone gets their registration in. I'm not sure about the proof-of-citizenship thing, since we had somewhat more relaxed authentication requirements, since a few teachers were there to witness everything.
Looks like a number of election-law changes will
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I would say (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I would say (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a scientist by education, training, and occupation, and I deal with statistics and measurement uncertainty on a daily basis. I have absolutely no faith in electronic voting precisely BECAUSE the lack of verifiability makes it inevitable that a systematic bias will be introduced by a corrupt individual. Random errors in counting should be nearly negligible, and should be able to be kept down to around a percent or so. Also, if random errors of that magnitude are significant, they should be able to be dealt with by recounting ballots which have been secured in a publicly observed chain of custody. (Multiple measurements, smaller uncertainty.)
But the systematic errors are the real threat, because they give undue influence to lone individuals. There IS a "right result" in an election, and it is the one obtained by adding all the votes that were legitimately cast by voters in the election. And this can be obtained by using observable procedures which ensure the counting process accurately reflects the votes that were cast without systematic error.
I think you are viewing the problem completely backwards when you say that a less transparent system makes it easier to "believe" in conspiracy theories. The actual problem is that a less transparent system makes it much easier to CONDUCT a conspiracy. You don't need the consent of poll workers and poll observers to steal an election if you are using an electronic machine with no paper trail to do it.
I am quite confident that if I were programming or configuring a voting machine with no paper trail, and I wanted to steal an election, I would have the technological know-how to do this. And if I can do it, countless others can. The fact that electronic voting machines can be easily and invisibly compromised has nothing to do with voter perception. It is simply an objective fact.
Re:I would say (Score:5, Insightful)
Who the heck's idiotic idea was it that companies could make software to count votes, and then not let anybody look at the software and see what it actually does because it's "proprietary"?
Re: (Score:2)
Why, it would probably be Walden O'Dell [commondreams.org], former CEO of Diebold. Of course, he's not alone in the software world for wanting to keep software secret (I know that my firm is big on it!!!) but given his past, and the later revelations of the actual quality of the software and design, his motives are suspect.
Yes, I know, i
Re: (Score:2)
The idea is thought to have originated (as it was overhead in a restaurant in Crstal City, a short distance from the Pentagon) with Richard Bissell, former CIA Chief of Plans (and the guy from where those Mission Impossible-type of plans originated, and thought to be the major brain behind the eminently successful Mars
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The margin of error for a black-box computer voting system is 100%. As long as we accept that fact, your system works fine - although we can optimize away the electronic count step.
Re: (Score:2)
There are still several issues you haven't dealt with in this "proposal", and it isn't as simple as it seems. But thi