January 30, 2007

voting fraud, the next generation

After the postal voting scheme brought in by Labour that would disgrace a banana republic because of being wide open to fraud they have decided to try and go one better. No more hard manual labour in the dirty vote factories, ballots stuffed automatically at the touch of a button.

An computer network based voting system is possible, but doing electronic voting correctly is very hard. It hard because of the need for it to be both verifiable and prevent ballot stuffing, while at the same time be anonymous. The proposed solutions to these problems is outlined in a post on Slashdot and can be summarised as they are simply going to ignore them. The only safe guard is to trust the company running the system and that nobody got into the system before they did to get at the results.

Sensibly they decided not to introduce this system for everybody and most of the councils chosen are not marginal. However four of the five councils chosen where conservative controlled, the fifth was the only marginal and Labour controlled even though the Lib-Dems had got most of the votes.

Bright, new, shiny, extremely expensive, and worse than the existing system. Everything that you expect from this government.

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