> "fraud" ... could occur with fraudulent registrations -- me registering
> Benjamin A. Edelman, Benjamin B. Edelman, and so on.
> It could occur with non-fraudulent but still "not representative"
> messages -- like if I signed up as members of ICANN everyone I knew
> (or all the employees of my corporation) and had them all vote for
> me.
> And it could occur if I simply hacked into the voting tabulation
> system, added a lot of seemingly-legitimate members who voted the
> way I wanted them to vote, and covered my tracks.
>
We seem to be clear enough that registering E-mail accounts is
not an assurance of individual humans attached to them (your first
'fraud'), but why is it so hard to grasp that individuality is not an
assurance that an independent mind is attached (your 2nd)? Well,
you say, *verifying independence of mind is just so darned
expensive, we have to *assume the equation of one mind per
person.
It might be nice if ICANN had a budget to verify the personhood of
every member -- but failing that, arent accounts the most
economical basis for legitimation (and, if one looks at the concept
of net-voting overall, also the most logical)? There is a great deal of
absolutely free data supplied with every message just for the
purpose of 'verification' of its origins. Various agencies, I
understand, already find it useful for their purposes; and in any
case, it might work as a 'dry run' just to see what fraudulence
shows up. (It would have to be represented as the real thing, of
course, or no one would bother.)
But, instead of worrying about *technically hacking the system,
why not find a way to correlate e-mail directly with mind, and thus
route around the person-problem (aka personality) altogether? But
(sigh) TINSTAAFPS: too many people would spoof their mail, just
to make it *look like it had some independent thought in it.
kerry
