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

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 06:37 PM 5/19/2007, Juho wrote:
 > registrations

>I have understood that in US one can be denied the right to vote if
>one has not registered. If you are interested in guaranteeing the
>potential candidates the ability to register at the last minute or
>never, maybe you are also interested in guaranteeing voters the right
>to vote.

There is a deadline for registration which is further in advance of 
the election than the deadline I would set to register as a 
"write-in". I see it as a totally different problem. The only reason 
to require write-in candidates to register at all is to make it 
possible to name them without writing the name in.

Juho is persisting in considering the "rights of candidates." While 
there are certain rights that candidates have, including fair and 
equal treatment, my concern is not with any "right of candidates" to 
be eligible for write-in. By default here, if they are eligible by 
law to hold the office, they are eligible to receive write-in votes, 
the only additional requirement being that they are clearly 
identified on the ballot.

It is the right of *voters* to vote for anyone they choose that I'm 
concerned with. And then how to implement that in a secure way. 
Personally, I don't think the issue of the ability of a voter to, 
possibly, mark a ballot so as to make it identifiable is a serious 
problem. But I was trying to think of ways to deal with the problem. 
Frankly, I've got better things to do.... I should not have gone into 
to this length.

But there is one point which shows the circular thinking that can get 
involved here:

>Another more difficult case. I know that you are a democrat and you
>have spoken in favour of X and against Y. This may be sufficient to
>limit the number of ballots that could be your ballot to a small
>number of ballots. If all (credible ones) of those have marked Z then
>I'll know that you also voted Z. (I know in small places there are
>people who know pretty well the opinions of all the local people and
>are therefore able to make the mapping quite well.)

In other words, if you know how I will vote, you might be able to 
identify my ballot, presuming that my patterns are quite idiosyncratic.

If you know how I will vote, which is presumably on the important 
issues (it might be hard to know how I would vote on a minor issue 
where I have expressed no opinion and, indeed, might not even have 
one), then why do you need to identify my ballot? Indeed, you could 
not use this even as a confirmation of your suspicion, for to use it 
that way, you would have to know that it was my ballot. The procedure 
described could indeed make it reasonably likely that the ballot had 
been identified, though only under rare circumstances, but ends up 
telling you nothing about me that you did not already know, for sure. 
Maybe for some reason, for example, I did not vote at all on one of 
the issues you predict that I would vote a certain way. It can happen.

The thinking here is that identifying the ballot is bad, it violates 
the privacy of the voter. But the ability to identify the ballot 
depends on having already penetrated that veil. So it is not some new 
evil, and it is moot.