[pp.int.general] Towards a secure eDemocracy platform based on Web service standards

[Juan Irache]

The election day in Spain is a huge mess.

Muriel pointed out some of the issues (big parties mail the ballots prior
to the election, private voting is an uncommon thing...) but there's more.

If you wander around he voting sites, you can easily see a husband handing
out the ballots of a particular party to the whole family or dozens of
affiliates from the big parties literally helping old ladies with the
voting process (just in case they forgot who the good ones are).

In fact, when I was officially supervising the system for Pirata.cat, an
old woman asked me about the pirates (It happens a lot, and it's legal as
long as you don't tell them directly what to vote. Hence the amount of
"helpers" that the parties send) a representative from CiU (governing party
in Catalonia) whispered something to her and she went away from me,
horrified. There might be a small percent of voters that change their mind
in the last moment, thanks to those strategies.

On the other hand, the very few e-voting experiments that we have had,
proved to be quite messy too. Some people not being able to vote, some
impersonating others, and so on.

2012/7/15 Dario <i at dario.im>

> 2012/7/15 Richard Stallman <rms at gnu.org>
>
>>
>>     In PP-CAT we have a voting system where everyone can see its own vote
>>     and the total result, and only the System administrators (3) of the
>>     server hosting the voting system can check the database to see what
>>     voted every member (so far, it has never been done/requested).
>>
>> This may be ok within PP-CAT.  Perhaps there is little danger anyone
>> will be bullied or bribed into voting a particular way; if so, this
>> system is no problem in that context.
>>
>>
> This is an example of different kind of voting. One thing is our internal
> system (as PP-CAT's sysadmin I can say that we never checked the database)
> and another one are government elections, where I agree that 100% secure
> electronic voting is not feasible nowadays.
>
> We can't look for an unique system but if someone achieve it, hey, let's
> prize him/her with a Nobel :) Meanwhile, there are middleground options:
> http://www.wombat-voting.com/ I like to show this because I think it has
> some advantages from both options and it is "easy" to replicate in an open
> source way (which is the only thing I miss from Wombat).
>
> --
> Dario Castañé
> http://www.dario.im | http://twitter.com/im_dario
>
>
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>


-- 
Juan Irache
http://irache.com.au
+61-420-638-767
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