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"John R. Levine" wrote:
> The current election system, for all its faults, is the result of two
> centuries of effort by people not all of whom were completely stupid,
> and has a complex and not always set of features to defend against all
> sorts of schemes to corrupt an election. The punch card ballot
> happens to be a uniquely bad technology for reasons we all know, but
> most of the surrounding infrastructure is old and kludgy but not
> broken. We need to keep this in mind when designing something new and
> zoomy that's supposed to replace it.
>
I could not agree more! The purpose of the legislation is to assist
the existing election processes, not replace them out of whole cloth!
In fact, the latest #1.3 draft changed the short title to
``Electronically Assisted Federal Election Requirements Act''.
This discussion has digressed onto smartcards. That's not helpful, as
no legislator (that I'm aware of) is proposing use of smartcards, nor
a national voting ID. As some have noted, the specifics of this bill
would create single use public/private key certificates, that would
expire at the closing of the polls.
However, if there is any language that would prohibit smartcards,
please let me know. We are trying to be technology neutral.
And in the same vein, I forwarded Ed Gerck's list of published
'requirements' to Lynn. She intends to use them as a perfect example
of what we DO NOT want!
Ed Gerck wrote:
> 1. Sixteen requirements for voting. The requirements are technologically
> neutral and can be applied to paper, electronic or Internet systems. There
> is an extensive discussion of alternatives, before the requirements are
> summarized. Available at http://www.thebell.net/archives/thebell1.7.pdf ,
> page 3.
>
There are some requirements that are nearly identical to those that
we've selected. And I like the kudos to IETF, and open systems.
However, the first half dozen are based on the bad presumption that:
1. Fail-safe voter privacy. Define: “voter privacy is the
inability to know who the voter is.” Assure voter privacy
even if everything fails and everyone colludes.
First of all, that's not "privacy", that's "anonymity".
We have voter registration precisely so that we know who the voters
are! We are not changing voter registration....
4. Fail-safe privacy in universal verifiability. If the
encrypted ballots are successfully attacked, even with
court order, the voter’s name must not be revealed. In
addition, the system must provide for “information-theoretic
privacy” (i.e., privacy which cannot be broken
by computation, even with unbounded time and
resources) in contrast to systems that would only provide
for “computational privacy” (i.e., privacy which could be
broken by computation, given time and resources).
I cannot believe any security analyst worth his salt could 'specify'
such as requirement. When I specified computational infeasibility of
100 years, the Science staff came back and asked how NIST would test
that? We reduced it to 10 years, something that might be achievable.
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