a quick pun i cant do...

what would be merlins widest spell?

there is a picture of a peakcock and a fox so i think it's got something to do with tv....

Something about the English channel?

Julie Waters schrieb:

This condition needs to be stronger. You need to ensure that votes can't be bought. If you issue a voter with a proof for the vote he cast, he can use that as barter. This is the point where your idea falls short.

Why is that needed?

The most efficient electronic voting system I can imagine works like this:

a) you hold the election on a holiday.

b) you keep polling precincts small.

c) you staff each polling station with people nominated by all major parties. It's a bit like jury duty, every party must like at least one member who serves, and there should be at least three per polling station.

d) You let people cast their vote using a computer that also prints a ballot; the ballot is then stuffed into an urn.

e) At the end of the day, the computer prints a tally for the people at the polling place and also transmits an unoffical tally to the central voting office.

f) The staff at each polling station open the urn, dump out the ballots and publicly count them (anyone may watch). When the staffers are satisfied as to the accuracy of the count, the official result is pronounced and transmitted by fax or phone to the central election office. This will be a confirmation of the earlier electronic transmission, in most cases. This will usually happen in a time of 2-4 hours after the polls close.

g) The ballots are placed in the urn again; the urn is resealed; and the ballots are taken to secure storage.

h) The local paper prints the official election results for each polling station.

Advantages to using the electronic phase over paper-only: a) easier to handle on US-type ballots, with zillions of elections going on at the same time b) can be multilingual and allow secret voting for some handicapped people (e.g. blind people) c) faster transmission of preliminary tallies d) provides a countercheck against the manual count

Cheers

And you also have to deal with post-hoc ballot-box stuffing: suppose turnout is only 30%, that's a hell of a lot of spare voter registration numbers hanging around.

As was noted when a similar system to yours was discussed on sci.crypt a while back, there is an additional problem: any voting system with a receipt suffers from the intimidation problem: if you can prove which way you voted, then someone can force you to vote the way they want.

Julie Waters schrieb:

Yes, you can verify the system without a receipt. You have to verify what goes in (identify voters and ensure there's a 1-1 relation between voters and ballots cast), that no tampering is going on during the polling, and that the results are accurately counted afterwards.

You cannot put a black box in one part of the process and hope to make up for it by verifying later.

Cheers

Some very good thoughts here. Just last Sunday I posted something similar on a local interest group. I will copy it here:-

Article 37376 of ncf.ca.seniors: Date: 7 Nov 2004 19:41:16 GMT

It occurred to me the other day that a very efficient way of carrying out future elections would be to make use of government lottery terminals that we see and most of us use fairly regularly.

They could be used for all elections - federal, provincial, municipal, and whatever else.

Every voter would have a unique electoral identification number and password which s/he would keep for ever(?). At election time a special 6-49 card would be available from the lottery terminal operator. The card would be printed up with spaces for the ID number, password and the names of the candidates; each name would have an empty square alongside it.

When ready to vote, each voter would enter the ID number and password and would fill in the square alongside the candidate of his or her choice.

The card would be presented at any lottery terminal during a set period of time. Say from 8:00 am one Monday to 6:00 pm the following Monday. No need for advanced polls in a situation like this. Voters could vote as many times as they wished, but only the last vote would count.

Election results could be tabulated and published probably within an hour of the closing time.

One problem that I have with this is as follows. How could the electoral officer, or whoever, make sure that no person had more than one ID number and password?

If anyone reading this thinks the system has any kind of merit, maybe they could submit a solution to the multi ID/password problem.

Tudor Jones.

End of copy.

By no means is this perfect. Votes could be sold, bad people could have more than one ID number and password. But it would be nice if it could be made to work. Especially in the States where so many votes have to be cast by each person. If more than one card was necessary, then these could be filled out ahead of time in the comfort and security of ones home, and the cards later presented at the closest lottery terminal. Very fast and not too expensive.

/ / T.P.Jones. / www.storm.ca/~tjones/index.html

Which kind of 1-2-3 voting? Condorcet? Borda? IRV?

Dunno but voting should be made compulsory; the fight for the right to vote was long and hard and should not be given away lightly. Compulsory voting preserves the democracy.

There should be two extra boxes on the voting slip. One which says 'I don't want to record a vote' (actually you don't need that, you can just not fill in a paper. The other box should say 'None of the above' and is counted along with the other votes. If this wins, then there is another election and the original candidates can't stand. There is also some merit in preferential voting. The problem with first past the post is that in a three candidate contest, one can with on 34% of the vote, but the majority (ie 66%) don't want that candidate.

'Dogstar' wrote

Nope. I can beat that:

M e r l i n s

Damn... I was so sure.

(Description of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) snipped)

There are problems with IRV; when the Greens get of comparable strength to the Democrats, their presence on the ballot can cause a Republican win, so even then Green supporters may not vote Democrat.

What are your thoughts on approval voting, which Badnarik (in a moment of non-nuttiness) endorsed? You can vote for any number of candidates; the candidate who gets the most votes wins.