[E-voting] Summary of meeting

[Fergal Daly]

Very interesting, well done guys.

On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 01:04:59AM +0000, Adrian Colley wrote:
> Official R smirked a lot when telling us our VVAT schemes wouldn't work.
> He didn't actually say why any of them wouldn't work.  The
> put-it-in-a-ballot-box method, which we had clearly distinguished from a
> vote-receipt method, he eventually dismissed as "receipts" without
> further comment.  He simply interrupted the description of the Mercuri
> method as soon as "presiding officer" was mentioned, saying that the
> procedure seemed to grow ever more complex (as if we were shifting the
> goalposts).  He didn't return to the topic when it was pointed out that
> the same procedure (mutatis mutandis) exists involving the presiding
> officer in the all-paper system; he simply mocked us, saying "when you
> have a problem in one method, you come up with another, then when
> there's a problem with that, you've got another, and so on!".  I don't
> recall him saying anything at all when the optical-scan method was
> discussed.  I suppose we should have told him off for this, but we were
> in a constant rush to get on to the next thing, always fearing that the
> meeting was about to be over.

I think official R almost has a point, I've seen this happen on the list as
people go over old ground and point out problems with this and that and the
proposed voting method gets tweaked to cope with this or that problem but
sometimes this tweak then unsolves a previously discussed problem. Usually
everyone has a image in their mind of how all these problems are solvable
individually but a system that solves them all simultaneously is frequently
ugly.

It wasn't until I wrote up the description of how the current machines could
have VVAT added to them that I realised what a terrible system it would be.
I think that optical scan (either computer printed ballot and no DRE or hand
marked with a ballot checker available to voters) is the only system that
addresses all of these without badness. For example any DRE+VVAT system will
suffer from the paper doesn't match data problem which will naturally damage
the reputation of the system whether it was accidental or deliberate.
Unfortunately it seem the dept thinks that heaps of paper = badness.

I think in future it is important to have a complete description of what we
consider an acceptable solution. Until you have this written down, you
cannot refute the point made by Mr R. I know we have tried to avoid
advocating a particular system but I think this is a weakness in our
position that needs to be fixed. I don't think I'll have time to do this
(new job, new country!) but I think it needs to be done,

F