Subject: internet voting -- ICANN, SmartInitiatives, etc.

From: "James P. Salsman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 04:46:30 -0800 (PST)

Was the ICANN election by Instant Runoff Voting or Condorcet?
The terms are defined at:  http://www.fairvote.org/irv/
and:  http://www.vision25.demon.co.uk/pol/votefaq.txt

It is great it was by were choice ballots.  As there seems to 
be a renewed commercial interest in election equipment, would 
an Internet Voting BOF be a good idea at this point?  I would 
like to see the IETF take the lead in fraud prevention measures, 
and with luck produce some sane accurate advice to balance the 
commercial hype that is sure to spew forth very soon.

Here is an interesting effort to use certificate authentication 
("digital signature") technology to put California's signature 
gathering process online:

  http://www.smartinitiatives.org

I think that is a good first step; far better than general 
"internet voting" in regular elections, which hasn't been 
demonstrated to be more fraud-resistant than absentee paper 
ballots by any government that I know of.  Are there any such
examples that I just haven't heard of yet?

Cheers,
James

---

From: "Stephen Sprunk" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2001 19:12:54 -0600

Thus spake "James P. Salsman" <[email-masked]>
> "internet voting" in regular elections,

Throwing encryption at voting is not enough to solve algorithmic
problems.  Digital signatures violate ballot secrecy and provide no
protection against most forms of fraud.

> which hasn't been demonstrated to be more fraud-resistant than
> absentee paper ballots by any government that I know of.  Are there
> any such examples that I just haven't heard of yet?

The de facto (and in some places legislated) standard for electronic
voting security is the absentee paper ballot.  Aside from technical
details, both have the same fundamental problems:

o  Ballots are subject to coercion, theft, and sale.
o  The voter may not know if the balloting medium is compromised.
o  A voter can sign an affidavit and vote again at the polls.
o  Ballot secrecy can be broken by government conspiracy.

All of these fraud methods are already available today, and it is
possible to design an electronic voting system which introduces no new
methods.  It is also possible to make the first three reversible after
detection, which can't be done with paper ballots now.

Schneier's _Applied Cryptography_ is a good place to start reading up on
secure elections.  Alas, the first round of "Internet Voting" being
fueled by California and Texas appears to focus on data encryption and
"secure" hardware, not truly secure algorithms which can be performed in
the clear at minimally-trusted machines.

> James

S

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