Re: Concerns about the election process

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

[dropping foundation-list since it's getting technical]

On Mon, 2006-11-27 at 01:19 -0500, Ryan Lortie wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-26-11 at 20:18 -0600, Gabriel Burt wrote:
> > On 11/26/06, Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org> wrote:
> > > What he's saying is that, suppose you voted for me, Quim, Federico,
> > > Dave, Bastien, Luis, and Jeff, and were given the anonymous token
> > > 0bhnyOzwLJ05jYV2phjusfe0jBYO3HZf.  How do you make sure that no one else
> > > who voted for the same seven candidates received the same anonymous
> > > token?
> >
> > I misunderstood.  This could be solved by printing the token and the
> > date/time that the vote was received, couldn't it?
>
> This solution would reduce the degree of the problem, but you still have
> the (less likely) problem of people voting for the same candidate around
> the same date/time.  It's really much easier to simply allow the user to
> provide their own token.

That has the downside that if two people decide to choose the same
token, that can degrade the *look* of the resulting list as a token is
associated with two votes, or for example if I decide to use your name
as my token...  Stronger would be to generate the token (sha1 for
example) from the name of the voter, people he voted for (in a specific
order), and a random token.

> Cheers
-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
 Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
        -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759