Re: Secret votes HOWTO

[Seth Arnold <sarnold@willamette.edu>]

* Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl> [010404 21:00]:
> On Wed, Apr 04, 2001 at 01:27:08PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> > 	Any other technical reasons?
> 
> You seem to have eliminated all the reasons for having a secret vote
> in the first place.  Shall we not bother, then?  Open votes are
> certainly easier to run.

Manoj's proposal allows individual votes to remain secret if so desired.
(Except for the pathalogical case where all people except one disclose
their votes -- the one remaining person is tied to his or her vote by
the fact of being left nameless.) It isn't as draconian as one may
think.

However, I think we agree that it really ought to be hashed -- I like
how the hash ties the vote to the voter along with the secret
information in a manner that is inextricable yet anonymous. I like how
voters must go to extra lengths to publish their votes. I acknowledge
that few people can remember a hash from time A to time B, but I counter
that any voter who cares could take the effort to write down the hash if
using {X, screen, splitvt} is too much work.

(I think few would care, if only because until recently no way of
checking was possible -- so people implicitly trusted the secretary. So,
for those that do care, writing down 32 digits shouldn't be too bad. :)

Unless the proposal changes again though, I'm done. Folks who are
following the thread know how I feel at this point. :)

-- 
Earthlink: The #1 provider of unsolicited bulk email to the Internet.