electronic voting: some thoughts

This fell out of a discussion with a friend this morning, so it may be treated as an ill-considered hare-brained notion, but anyway. I'm very much a real-world-vs-ivory-tower person; I feel very strongly that a delivered but incomplete product beats out a 100% complete product every time. This is sort of the Richard P. Gabriel "Worse Is Better" argument writ large; I feel it has applications well outside the realm of computers. Anyway. As such, I feel that if we spend all our time pissing about looking for 100% secure solutions to electronic voting, we're never going to get there. I'm handwaving the 100% insecure systems already deployed, obviously. What is needed is a system that's as trustworthy as a paper ballot. Paper ballots can be gamed, but their nature is generally that you can't severely game the system. The Canadian voting system is a good example of how this gaming is kept in check: each party can send people to witness the counting to make sure it's done fairly. There's still the issue of people being bribed or otherwise persuaded to vote in a particular way, and the issue of getting ballots from A to B, and the issue of how the final tallies are collated on a large scale. The system has holes, but is largely trustworthy. ( Waider considers electronic voting )