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

[Dr J Pelan]

On Fri, 10 Sep 2004, David GLAUDE wrote:

> 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.

The UK does this and I suspect Ireland does too but I haven't been a voter
there for a good while and, e-voting aside, I haven't kept up with the
legislation.

Personally, I have no difficulty with elections only being secret in
practise rather than in principle because, in the case of paper-based
elections, it is relatively easy to control the information that
correlates the voter with the vote. Performing the same process 
electronically would obviously be very risky indeed.

I like the idea of being able to extricate fraudulent votes without having
to redo an election, even if only at level of a single constituency. I do
not know whether this process has ever been performed which leads me to 
suspect that it doesn't happen very often, if at all.

--
John P.