[E-voting] Clear Thinking (was: Re Meeting)

[Fergal Daly]

On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 06:51:11PM -0000, Fergus O'Rourke wrote:
> 6. To insist that any EVP meets reasonable criteria ?
> 
> For myself, it seems obvious that the first three are out (OUT, OUT, OUT in
> fact !) and I am not too keen on 4 and 5, though I see their attractions and
> would have no problem at all with individuals who wanted to go that way.
> 
> Despite our name, I prefer a narrow focus on 6 which, I accept, requires us
> to seem more negative than we'd like to be. For the latter reason, I am
> prepared to countenance - I know that comes as a relief to many of you - the
> group at least exploring the option 4 and/or 5 route. Also, as a citizen and
> taxpayer, I'd love to see some value being obtained for our EUR 100
> million - it will be the correct figure soon if it isn't already - and for
> the attention invested.

It would be a lovely world if we could just do 6 but we can't. We are not
having a rational debate, unfortunately we are in a point scoring contest
whether we like it or not. Worst of all, the more points we score the harder
our task becomes (the more we make them look silly, the less likely we are
to get real change). So we need to stop them from scoring point.
Unfortunately they can score points easily by repeating the same untrue
statements about us. Their big weapons currently are:

1 they're perfectionists who will never be happy with any system
2 vvat is not practical and will cause a terrible mess of paperwork etc
3 they're conspiracy nuts this could never happen

Hopefully the US election will take care of 3 but at the moment our only
defense to 1 and 2 is "that's not true", possibly followed by a complicated
explanation that most people will not understand and therefore it can easily
be ignored/refuted by the govt.

We would do much better if our answer was "that's not true, we have
presented detailed descriptions of 2/3 systems that meet our criteria for
safety and the dept has not been able to point out any problems with them".

Also, I don't see a need to spend 3 years researching and documenting these
systems formally, 2 or 3 pages and a diagram or two is all we need to put
these points to bed,

F