[EM] Closed loop elections

[Michael Poole]

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