James Gilmour writes: > Closed loop elections. See: > http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/features/display.var.1511167.0.0.php > An engineer's answer to voters' imperfect knowledge?
It's a nice idea, but it assumes a degree of automation that most places do not have -- and are leery of adopting. For example, text message voting has serious authentication, confidentiality and other security weaknesses. It also assumes that the system has similar feedback periods for all districts, which seems unrealistic. In the 2006 mid-term elections in Virginia, some precincts in the northern part of the state took hours longer than the rest to report final counts; those precincts were enough to sway the race's results. (To the best of my knowledge, all of those precincts used optical scan machines, DRE machines, or a combination of the two. My local precinct gave voters the option of choosing between those.) The most significant flaw is that the scheme requires that voting not be anonymous. (How does the counter know which vote to change?) The comments on the article indicate that Scotland does not have truly anonymous ballots currently, but other places do. Michael ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
