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Re: [Demexp-dev] Thoughts on voting machines


From: Félix
Subject: Re: [Demexp-dev] Thoughts on voting machines
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 23:32:02 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.6 (Windows/20040502)

Hi Brian,

My two cents:

is with no technological existance.  Paper, locked in secure boxes, is
amazingly hard to tamper with.
I have to disagree with this. I'm doing magic as a hobby. I went to see votes counting several times, and I had a look at the process. When voting is finished,
they take the enveloppes out of the ballot box and put them one hundred
at a time in bigger enveloppes that are dispatched betwen the tables for the
public to count them. Switching the big enveloppe to another one is actually
very easy for someone who knows these kind of tricks. Even switching the ballot box during the voting process can be done with a little preparation, trust me.

Tampering is also done before the elections: several elections in Paris where tampered by creating "fake" voters (that's how our current president got elected
mayor in the eighties there). Florida 2000 elections in US where tampered
by "cleaning" the voting lists abusively, with dramatical consequences.

I think the point is not that paper elections are safe, it's just that people *trust*
them, and that's enough. It worked pretty well, so they think it will keep
working in the future. Actually, they trust it so much that even when they
learn later that it was tampered, they do not make a big fuss about it!

People have to trust electronic voting. And that's harder because technical
knowledge of computer stuf is not that common. I have the personnal feeling
that it will be easier to make electronic voting secure than to convice people
that it really is...

Cheers,

 Felix










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