[CAVO] Online contracts and voting

Thu Jun 2 21:54:19 UTC 2016

David Webber wrote:

> Please send money and we can engineer this for you.

Such unreasonable paranoia about voting!  

I have on my desk right now two signed and sealed ballots for the California primary next week. I know that my partner voted for a different candidate than I did. I'm going to walk into the County office and drop these two ballots, probably unmodified :-), into a wooden box on their counter. Somehow our votes will be counted by some machine that reads ink in bubbles. Results next Tuesday. Perhaps some of our votes will count. 

And so our president will be chosen!

Please don't waste your design time engineering a solution for problems I don't have. Just give me a simple way to vote – securely and with a trusted record – more effectively and cheaply than those two silly envelopes on my desk.

BTW, in Kenya almost all financial transactions are made through ordinary cell phones with passwords. And even here, in the U.S., my bank will accept deposits sent through pictures of signed checks from my phone. But we're much more paranoid here, especially about voting. 

/Larry

From: David RR Webber (XML) [mailto:david at drrw.info] 
Sent: Thursday, June 2, 2016 2:39 PM
To: lrosen at rosenlaw.com; CAVO <cavo at opensource.org>
Subject: RE: [CAVO] Online contracts and voting

Larry,

That's why the USPS now accepts digital copies of money orders, instead of having to send the paper one.

Not!  That could of course be digital too - but - you would need a way to track all that - matching digitally presented versions to repository.  That's called Paypal, Google, Square or ApplePay et al.

Similarly registering to vote - concur - that can be a digital process - but then its gets more tricky. Yes - I can issue you with a digital voting token - but then how do I know you really cast that ballot? Parties could cast proxy votes for party members - and maybe there's nothing wrong with that - but - we're not there yet. 

Unlike in the money order or check situation - where tracking who does what inbetween is not part of the process - with balloting it is.  Except there's a twist - in the banking transaction - everything can be logged to a specific user entity - whereas in voting it has to be anonymous.  And that is where things get problematic. It's a bit like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle - the more anonymous you make it - the less you know what happened - the more you know what happened - the less anonymous.

And then who do you trust? Personally I want to see 3 separate systems of record - and be able to cross check. So if 1 gets compromised its obvious. And then to compromise all 3 simultaneously - that's really hard to do.

And it all needs to be open source and accredited.

Please send money and we can engineer this for you.

David

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [CAVO] Online contracts and voting
From: "Lawrence Rosen" < <mailto:lrosen at rosenlaw.com> lrosen at rosenlaw.com>
Date: Thu, June 02, 2016 1:54 pm
To: "'CAVO'" < <mailto:cavo at opensource.org> cavo at opensource.org>
Cc: Lawrence Rosen < <mailto:lrosen at rosenlaw.com> lrosen at rosenlaw.com>

I haven't executed a contract in recent years – even with the federal or state or county government – that wasn't immortalized by some form of electronic signature. Sometimes they also require a paper signature on paper forms that they file somewhere and then throw away. But I'm as legally bound by my scanned signature as I am by my hand-signed document.

One of my clients recently complained about the boxes of printed documents that they passed, from year to year, to their non-profit volunteer corporate secretary. But instead, I told them, PDF copies of most documents, stored in an online repository with security and backup, is all anyone needs nowadays.

Registering and voting should be no more difficult than what the government already accepts on almost everything nowadays.

/Larry

From: David RR Webber (XML) [ <mailto:david at drrw.info> mailto:david at drrw.info] 
Sent: Thursday, June 2, 2016 10:11 AM
To: CAVO < <mailto:cavo at opensource.org> cavo at opensource.org>
Subject: Re: [CAVO] Article

And these same people will be the first ones to cry "Foul" if someone gets on the ballot with dubious credentials that they can neither refute nor confirm - via some "Kickstarter" like campaign...

David

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [CAVO] Article
From: Brent Turner < <mailto:turnerbrentm at gmail.com> turnerbrentm at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, June 02, 2016 1:01 pm
To: CAVO < <mailto:CAVO at opensource.org> CAVO at opensource.org>

 <http://www.mercurynews.com/michelle-quinn/ci_29959886/quinn-elections-should-ditch-paper-embrace-technology> http://www.mercurynews.com/michelle-quinn/ci_29959886/quinn-elections-should-ditch-paper-embrace-technology

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