Re: Concerns about the election process

[Davyd Madeley <davyd fugro-fsi com au>]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2006 at 01:22:47AM -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-11-26 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?  Is this
> > information being logged so it could be used in this election?
> > Another way could be to publish a list of people who voted, and people
> > can check they are listed there, and compare the number of voters to
> > the number of votes listed.
>
> No.  It's not easy really.  Just because the number of voters matches
> the number of anon tokens listed, doesn't mean that unique tokens were
> handed out to voters.  The results can be perturbed by handing out the
> same token to more than one voter, and insert phony tokens with
> arbitrary votes attached to them.
>
> There's nothing we should rush for this year.  The point is /not/ that
> the election committee cannot be trusted.  The point is, if we want to
> have a system in which the voters do not have to trust the election
> committee, then our current system does not qualify, and for the least,
> it should not be advertised like it does.

A few years ago I put together this proposal, but it was considered
to be too complex for GNOME:

http://oracle.bridgewayconsulting.com.au/~davyd/misc/gnome-voting/

It would require both a specialised GNOME voting client (well, we
are a desktop UI group..) and an anonymizing service like Tor. It
would also require public/private keypairs, for example the ssh keys
we use for CVS.

--d

-- 
Davyd Madeley        Software Engineer
Fugro Seismic Imaging, Perth Australia