Re: Vote verification --- a futile exercise?
On Fri, 2002-04-05 at 04:51, Richard Braakman wrote:
> Oh... I just realized that per-day batching would still not work.
> Suppose the vote taker's favourite candidate does something really
> unpopular halfway through the vote (such as revealing his Secret Master
> Plan to Take Over the World). In that case, dropping votes from the
> second half of the voting period could affect the outcome.
You'd have to be able to predict that the candidate would have such a
plan, and would reveal it in the middle of the election. This might not
be a problem if the CTF is also the Second-In-Command, Evil Plot, Inc.
The general problem still remains, however: if the CTF can drop random
unknown votes, and if the CTF can correlate any outside event with
probabilities in voter activity times, then the CTF can exert influence
on the election results. Even something like a popular tech conference
("Euro voters are all at CeBIT this week") or a holiday ("all the Irish
developers are too busy partying to vote on St. Patrick's Day") could be
used.
Using this protocol, the best solution to all these problems is voter
vigilance. If enough voters threw a fit that their votes weren't being
published, then (as you pointed out), the whole election process could
be stopped pending an investigation.
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