Re: Vote verification --- a futile exercise?
On Thu, 2002-04-04 at 17:53, Richard Braakman wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 04, 2002 at 12:11:32AM -0500, Jeff Licquia wrote:
> > Also, the CTF may drop
> > votes, and the voter cannot prove that (s)he actually voted properly;
> > one would think, though, that if this happened enough to influence the
> > election, enough of a public stink would be raised that the election
> > results would be suspect.
>
> Hmm... the CTF can drop votes, but not after it has published the
> encrypted message containing the vote. And it doesn't get the
> decryption key for the vote until after all votes have been collected.
> So the CTF can drop votes, but it won't know whose votes they are or
> what the votes contain, so this is a suboptimal way of affecting the
> election results :)
Not necessarily. Consider this election, for instance; since Raphael is
the only European and only non-American candidate, this implies that he
will have greater support in Europe and areas considered anti-American.
If Manoj happened to want to influence the election against Raphael, he
could plot out timezones and look at times when voters from those areas
were more or less likely to vote (say, when local time is 5 am versus 7
pm) and randomly drop votes to coincide with times that
pro-European/anti-American voters were most likely to vote and
pro-American voters least likely. In a close race, this could affect
the outcome.
[Again, not that Manoj would ever do such a vile thing.]
> In addition, the voters involved can raise
> a stink _before_ the votes are counted, because they can refuse to
> send in their private keys until the matter is investigated.
That's true; I hadn't considered that possibility.
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