[EL] Internet Voting in Canada

[Joseph Lorenzo Hall]

On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 4:58 PM, Salvador Peralta
<oregon.properties at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Nevertheless, I disagree with this portion of Mr Jefferson's analysis:
>
> "In the ecommerce world problems are reliably detected because of such
> practices as receipts, double entry bookkeeping, and financial audit records
> kept by both sides of every major transaction. But in the online election
> world there are no receipts, no double entry bookkeeping, and no meaningful
> audit trail information."
>
> At the point a ballot is cast, it is a trivial matter to create a meaningful
> audit trail that can be retained by "both sides of the transaction".  One
> such mechanism is to send the voter an email with their vote record which
> can be reconciled against actual vote.

Hmmm, the only promising paperless voting systems I've seen use a
cryptographic receipt exposed to the voter before the vote is cast
(the trick with audit trails in voting is that you want the voter to
have an opportunity to check the interpretation of the ballot before
she "commits" to it). I'd be wary of using email for this kind of
mechanism simply because email is pretty fickle in terms of security
(unless using a PGP/GPG or S/MIME mechanism... read: cryptography). I
see Susannah has weighed in... best, Joe