[top-politics] Re: Secret votes

Magnus — 2006-11-22 17:32:25+0100

>Personally I plan to use PGP signatures to ensure that votes are attached to an identity. The link between that identity and a real person being up to the electoral list manager (and possibly to third party trustees).

-This way seems to be the best today, yes.

>> So you never know exatly when the vote is over.

>Strange. Are you sure nobody knows when a vote is over? You sure people would trust such a system?

Read more… / Lire plus…

-Sorry, I meant: You will never be able to tell when the vote WILL be over in advance.
Once the accumulated support has reached 1 or -1 the vote is over and thsi will ofcourse be public..

>> Maybe a solution would be that the ballot is not possible to retrieve > once the vote is over.

>No more traceability and reproducibility then :(

-I agree and I would like to be able to check afterwards..

>And who will pay anyone for his vote if not > sure of delivery?

>Many! One only needs enough to have a proposition accepted.

-I’m not so sure, there will be many proposals and not all may be found relevant enough to start to gain interest. For instance, a company wants a new “better” law for their messy chemical business, Today, the company has to lobby in the proposal to some politicians and hopefully they might find a majority in the countrys parliament. With the AD-system in place, the company would also have to convince a lot of men of the street, otherwise the proposal could be lying there for years and no lobbyist is paid for an unlimited time since they are bought by businesses who want’s relativley quick results. So the slowing-down effect of AD is a new hinder by itself.

>In many democratic countries, effort to buy votes is legally forbidden, not just the act itself.

-Yes, and so it has to remain. And it will probably not be possible to go out and buy large amounts of votes for a specific issue since the risk of beeing caught increases exponentially with the number of people involved.
And if it’s possible, the efforts needed to succed in one single issue is probably not worth it, compared to if you where buing votes for a complete mandate peiod for a president or governement.

>Of course we could also imagine a totally opaque system where no data but the result can get out. But I’m not sure I would trust it.

-Neither do I, blackbox systems are useless.

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