[EM] danger of coercion (Re: First U.S. Scientific Election Audit...)

[Juho]

On May 15, 2007, at 18:11 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

> eliminating all possibility of a coercer knowing that the victim  
> has complied is impossible.

I think some very basic methods eliminate the possibility of coercion  
quite well (e.g. ballots with only few options, no write-ins, marked  
ballots rejected, voting only manually, at places well controlled by  
representatives of multiple interest groups, only one person allowed  
in the voting booth and at the ballot box at one time, and many  
enough voters per voting location).

> Discarding marked ballots is dangerous because it creates a ready  
> method for those bent on election fraud to invalidate ballots.

In my previous mail I recommended representatives of all political  
groupings to be present when the votes are counted. If there are  
fraudsters with full uncontrolled access to the ballots they could do  
many tricks like replace some ballots with new ones.

> a coercer, under present law, can already arrange to view ballots  
> directly.

I guess this refers to the U.S law. This of course (in addition to  
providing some openness) introduces also some privacy and coercion  
related problems.

Juho




	
	
		
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