[EL] The $45M Hiest from NYC ATMs

[David Jefferson]

In the financial world both parties to the transaction have full knowledge of the transaction details and presumably keep receipts, audit trail data, and other records of the transaction details (e.g. contract provisions). If there is a fraudulent transaction someone is sure to discover it eventually when a future transaction fails because some account is unexpectedly out of money. Then the auxiliary records are used to unwind the transaction history to see what happened and if possible, correct it.

This is not the case for voting transactions, however, for reasons fundamentally rooted in the secrecy of the ballot. (This is one of those voting security issues I mentioned that have no analog in the financial transaction world.) With current online voting systems a voter or an official may be able to check that some ballot was received from a particular voter in an online election, but neither of them are able to verify that the actual votes on that ballot are those that were originally cast by a particular voter. To do so would mean that it is possible to associate a particular voter with his or her particular cast ballot, which is exactly what is supposed to be impossible with secret balloting.

Errors and frauds in the online financial transaction world are virtually always detectable, and often correctable. (One exception, of course, is when the financial transaction funds are converted to cash.) But with current technology online election fraud is likely to go completely undetected, and even if it is detected, the secret ballot requirement will often make it impossible to know exactly which ballots are fraudulent so they can be removed from the count. We may not even know how many ballots were affected. In general, voting systems are much more brittle, vulnerable, and unforgiving than financial systems.

David

David Jefferson
d_jefferson at yahoo.com