[extropy-chat] [psl at acm.org: ACTION ALERT: Blackwell purgedOhio Voter Rolls Oct 1st.- Vote Early!]

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky sentience at pobox.com
Sat Oct 21 01:59:19 UTC 2006


spike wrote:
> 
> The most remarkable aspect of the notion of paperless voting is not how easy
> it would be to hack.  Most of us realize that any paperless system could be
> theoretically hacked.  The thing that I find much more remarkable is how
> very easy it would be to design a system that would be verifiable.  How many
> ways can you imagine?  Consider:
> 
> Voting place, barrel of unique random numbered tickets, you choose one.
> They give you the magnetic card that records your vote, you insert your
> card, enter your number off the ticket, no one knows who got what number so
> the vote is secret, you do the touch-screen thing, machine creates a receipt
> with a printed bar code registering your choices, not human readable so you
> still maintain secrecy.  The day after the elections, a website with an
> enormous excel spreadsheet, records of every ticket number with how that
> ticket voted, still completely secret if you kept your ticket number to
> yourself.  You verify the vote is recorded the way you thought you voted.
> If not, go to the news people with your ticket and your voting receipt.
> Then see if all the erroneous votes are for the same guy or proposition.
> 
> Evolution damn, how easy is this?  This would be cheap and easy, and would
> establish actual credibility of a paperless election.  It would be more
> credible than the old punchcard elections too.

The problem is that it then becomes possible to buy votes and verify 
that people voted the way they said they would...

...which isn't really much of a problem compared to entire elections 
being stolen out of hand, so I'd say go for it.

It is, however, the excuse that the existing gameplayers would use not 
to adopt the system.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence



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