[EM] Open Voting Consortium for e-voting?
Ken Johnson
kjinnovation at earthlink.net
Fri Apr 16 14:13:02 PDT 2004
>From: Ernest Prabhakar <drernie at mac.com>
>Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2004 11:12:01 -0700
>...
>
>
>>... Is there any way other groups could
>>get access to summaries (e..g, the pairwise matrix) or scrubbed subset
>>of ballots, for research purposes.
>>
>>
>Certainly precinct totals should be made available. We haven't done
>the threat analysis to determine whether or not individual ballots
>should be made available.
>
>
In my view, public disclosure of precinct totals should be construed as
a potential violation of voter secrecy. If a high percentage of people
in my precinct vote a particular way, one could draw a highly probable
inference about how I voted based on the precinct totals. Politicians
may show favoritism toward or bias against certain precincts based on
their voting patterns, or may use the information for targeted political
marketing campaigns.
Furthermore, public disclosure of ballots, even devoid of any voter or
precinct identity information, could also be construed as a secrecy
violation because the ballots could be used to determine correlations
between different ballot issues. For example, if the election includes a
ballot initiative for Electoral Reform, one could use the ballots to
determine the political constituencies of Electoral Reform advocates.
This kind of information might make some politicians less likely to
support Electoral Reform.
Of course, the ballot information could be obtained by conventional
polling methods (e.g., exit polling), but in this case the voters have
the option of withholding or misrepresenting their views. From my
perspective, the only kind of "research purpose" for which ballots can
be legitimately used is to determine the election outcome. Ballots and
precinct-level totals should only be available to election officials and
auditors who are obligated to maintain such information in confidence.
Ken Johnson
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