[E-voting] Minimum requirement to judge voting "technology"

[David GLAUDE]

The point with electronic ID card is about secrecy of the vote.

The day of the vote, the voter must identify himself and then can vote. 
In Belgium, you get your ID card only once you have deposit your vote 
(this could be to garantee that you do not forget to vote or do not go 
away with a sample paper ballot / magnetic card).

In Belgium, more and more citizen have a electronic ID card wich replace 
the plastic ID card. That new e-ID card counting much more information 
than the former, this include a certificate/key, a citizen unique 
identifier (that was optionnal on the plastic ID card), an electronic 
version of your picture, ... and maybe more biometrics in the futur.

In Belgium we write down who came to vote. This garantee that you don't 
come twice and permit some cross checking between the number of voter 
and the number of paper ballot / electronic ballot.

Under some condition, the president of the voting burreau can use a 
computer to record who came to vote. He only must reliably be able to 
print a record of the voter and non-voter.

There are two issue here:

1) First it mean that you are not in control of your ID card while 
voting. In most situation, you never give your ID card, you show it or 
at least it stay visible. In most situation you only show your ID to a 
police men or such... not to a normal citizen, even if he has been 
choosen to do the job.

For country without ID card this feeling, that you don't like your ID to 
be handed by somebody else, might be understandable. A voting card 
countain much less informations about you than your ID card.

2) It is possible and rather easy to record who voted when. Or to record 
in wich order those voter came, or ... Actually the procedure is that we 
have a dual paper record of who came, and the citizen in charge of 
checking the ID say to the one holding the backup/redundant register the 
name or the number of that voter. So recording the sound near those two 
citizen can help you have the order of the vote.

If that information can be cross checked with the ballot (obviously 
electronic) then the secrecy of the vote is not respected. And if I 
don't have the garantee of the secrecy of my vote, might vote diferently...

In Belgium, this is easy to do... please check 
http://www.afront.be/lib/vote.html#3 under the title "Expert denial.". 
The way the bad borland pseudo random generator is seeded is by using 
the clock... and this take place once in the morning, just before the 
voter arrive. So if one can get a copy of the floppy that countain the 
vote result... he get the order of the vote (do peaple from the morning 
vote democrat or republican? what if I close the voting place earlyer?) 
and cross checking that with who came when give you a good knowledge of 
who voted what.

In Belgium, those are attack against the system... but the risk could be 
much worth than that. Imagin that in order to facilitate the voter 
registration, you have to enter your electronic ID card inside the 
voting machine (and then you vote on the same machine). Even if the 
vendor and the state tell you that the vote secrecy is respected... it 
is hard to garantee and it would be normal for the citizen to fear about 
lost of secrecy.

Now to garantee voter secrecy, the process to identify/authenticate the 
voter and the process to register the vote should be completely 
separated from each other. The best would be that both are paper 
based... but with electronic voting in mind, at least one should be 
manual and the other electronic.

I was told that in some country (Ireland - Maragaret could confirm) use 
paper voting and each paper ballot countain a unique number and that 
number is recorded next to the voter name. The goal seems to be that if 
one vote is fraudulant, that paper ballot can be removed from the ballot 
box... Of course the risk is high. And this is paper based.

So don't forget about secrecy of the vote.

David GLAUDE

Marian Beddill wrote:

>> One point is that we (PourEva) have been focusing on the end-user side 
>> of e-Voting... but there are a lot of potential problem with:
>> * Voter registration
>> * Voter ID checking (electronic ID card)
>> * Transmission of the partial-result and computation of the total result
> 
> I agree with your list, David, except perhaps on the "electronic ID card".

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