[EM] 3ballot - revolutionary new protocol for secure secret ballot elections

[Dave Ketchum]

Is 3ballot worth the pain?

Does it REALLY provide the claimed service?

Does it complicate the voters' lives?

Is it compatible with Condorcet?  I remain a backer for Condorcet's 
combining capability with tolerable complexity.

Is it worth bothering with without demanding a TRUE voting machine for its 
installation?  ABSOLUTELY NOT, for there are too many ways to falsify the 
counting!

Given a TRUE voting machine, why add 3ballot?  ZERO value in this effort.

ps, As to privacy, I read of video-camera phones.  Their usage has to be 
tricky - can they verify a voter's actual vote as such without voting 
machine operation being set up compatible with such?

ps, quoting:  "I doubt there is a voting system in existence that is 
immune from enough vote verification to support vote buying or coercion"
      The lever machines I have been voting on all my life are immune, for 
they keep NONE of the records of interest.

DWK

On Fri, 6 Oct 2006 00:00:42 -0700 (PDT) David Cary wrote:
> 
> --- Warren Smith <wds at math.temple.edu> wrote:
> 
> 
>>Then still, your (KPY's) attack idea is still applicable even in
>>just one
>>race (if there are enough candidates, e.g. 135 in the CA governor
>>Schwarzenegger race)
>>and Rivest includes discussion of this attack in his (latest! but
>>not his original!) 
>>draft, calling it the "3-pattern attack" or "specified pattern
>>attack"
>>where the attacker coerces the voter to vote in a specific pattern
>>on his 3 ballots
>>and then sees if those patterns got published on the bulletin
>>board.  If not,
>>punish the voter.  This attack appears to be quite devastating to
>>me.
> 
> 
> A deficiency in protecting privacy against vote buying doesn't seem
> such a distinctive flaw.  Any scheme that requires collusion with the
> voter, whether voluntary or coerced, seems difficult to manage on a
> significant scale if there are sufficient legal and social
> injunctions against it.  Besides, in an era of smaller than
> palm-sized video-camera phones, even without absentee voting, I doubt
> there is a voting system in existence that is immune from enough vote
> verification to support vote buying or coercion
> 
> What is more important is being able to preserve the privacy of a
> vote when the voter acts to keep it private.
> 
> In general, the weak link in the 3ballot system is the checker.  It
> is a piece of technology that is still dependent on expert
> validation, its election day performance is not subject to
> independent or general public validation, and if there are any quirks
> or alleged quirks in its election day performance, there may be no
> audit trail, no recheck procedures, no way to recreate what the
> correct checking should have been.
-- 
  davek at clarityconnect.com    people.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek
  Dave Ketchum   108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY  13827-1708   607-687-5026
            Do to no one what you would not want done to you.
                  If you want peace, work for justice.