Circuit Court Okays Vote Swapping Site

scubacuda writes "C|net reports that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals court has ruled in favor of Alan Porter's website, Voteexchange2000.com, a site enabling Gore and Nader voters to swap their Gore votes in states where Bush was likely to win anyway for the Green party candidate Nader. In response to the court's decision, Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the ACLU's Southern California office, said, "We're pleased that the court's ruling permits us to challenge the legality of the secretary of state's partisan attempt to silence political speech on the Internet during the 2000 election." (For a look at some of the legal issues behind "vote swapping," visit Gigalaw)"

Comments

Vote Trading

[gnixdep]

Can I get odds?
I'll give you 12 Gore votes for a Nader and a first round fringe candidate.

Verifiable vote swapping is and should be illegal

[phr2]

Vote swapping in many instances in 2000 was done by trading marked absentee ballots. They did to make sure that the "Nader" vote they were swapping for didn't end up as a Bush vote. But absentee ballot trading is and should be illegal, since it gives another person a direct way to see how a particular ballot was cast. That undermines the secret ballot, which is an essential feature of democracy.

To elaborate: the secret ballot--not letting another person watch you vote--has to be mandatory to be fully effective. It's not enough to give you the option of voting secretly in a voting booth with the curtain drawn. Allowing another person into the booth with you to watch you vote has to be prohibited. Otherwise you can be coerced into voting a certain way and "voluntarily" inviting a verifier (your boss, your abusive spouse, the local Mafia don, etc) to make sure you followed your orders. Of course your boss can ask you how you secretly voted, but without direct verification, you can lie to him. That's correct, an intentional and desirable characteristic of the secret balloting system is it makes a way for you to lie your way out of a bad situation. But that means "vote swapping" with total strangers on the basis of mere pledges is a pretty dumb idea. You don't and can't have any way to know how they really voted.

Type "receipt-free voting" to see how designers of computerized cryptographic voting protocols try to deal with this problem. It's a hard theoretical problem, quite difficult to do securely and keep all the nice attributes of paper ballots.

Vote exchange, and often.

[mikeophile]

Let's see...

A few thousand bogus email addresses, check.

Form letter requesting vote swap, check.

A simple script to automate it all, check.

Wow, one person can make a difference.

Re:Yes, it's legal

[The_Steel_General]

And I can't remember of any president of any country in Europe after WW II who became president through court decisions.

What a coincidence: We haven't had any in the United States, either.

There are all sorts of problems I had with the vote in 2000, from the tactics of both Democrats and Republicans to the Supreme Court's decision. But looking back at it, it's pretty obvious that the Supreme Court didn't change the outcome one bit.

The timeline was something like this:
(For brevity, I'll just say Bush and Gore, for which you can read "Bush's people" and "Gore's minions" or any other grouping that you wish.)

1. The initial count is done, Bush is ahead by a miniscule margin.
2. A recount is automatically initiated. Gore gains a number of votes, but is still behind.
3. Gore requests hand recounts in a number of districts -- largely democratic ones, of course.
4. A number of different legal maneuvers are made, to stop or continue those recounts -- e.g. Bush sues in federal court to have them stopped, Gore sues in Florida's state court to continue.
5. After going back and forth between Bush, Gore, the Florida courts, and the Florida politicians for over a month, the Supreme Court steps into the fray.
6. The Supreme Court rules that, given the time that has passed, it's too late to set up a fair and unbiased counting system, so the votes as counted stand.

There were all sorts of problems with their ruling -- especially since it's up to Congress to decide If there is uncertainty or irregularities in electoral voting -- but it made absolutely no difference in the outcome.

Absolutely no difference.

Examination of all the Florida ballots showed that if the Supreme Court had ruled for Gore, he would still have lost. The votes he wanted re-counted didn't add enough to his column to give him the state. The only way it would have mattered was if he had requested a statewide recount that included all undercounts AND overcounts.

I think that IF every vote had been counted properly -- if every person's vote was clear, readable, and recorded -- Gore would have won. I would have preferred that the Rehnquist Court hadn't sullied their good name with a decision that made them look partisan and opportunistic. And I really would have liked a scenario that allowed both Bush and Gore to lose. But if you think that Bush was only elected due to the whims of the Supremes, you should take another look at What Really Happened.

TSG