Avi Rubin Has Some Optimistic Words About E-Voting

An anonymous reader writes "For more than a decade, Aviel "Avi" Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University in the US and an e-voting activist, has been a vocal critic of e-voting systems. In this interview Rubin talks about the recent US presidential primary election cycle and his thoughts on e-voting going into the November US elections."

Comments

One e-voting system for you

[realnowhereman]

I really don't get why it's seen as so hard. Here, I'll make one up for you right now; this process would run for every voter. Each vote is not linked to the individual, so the vote remains secret, but is simple to trace:

  - "Please enter a 6 digit random number" = X
  - "Please enter your vote" = V
  - INSERT INTO Votes SHA1HASH( X || Now() ), V
  - "Here is a printout summarising your vote. The long number
      may be used at a later date to confirm that your vote was
      correctly recorded"

Now - how hard was that? Then you supply a website were the voter enters the long number and it shows me my vote. If what shows on the website is not equal to what I thought I voted for any significant number of people, then vote rigging has occurred.

There are a whole load of variations, but the principle would be the same in all. The voter can confirm that their vote was correctly recorded independently. The vote is stored using a secret number that is supplied/known only to the voter.

Re:The problem

[ShieldW0lf]

If you want self-determination, you need courage. It doesn't come free. Personally, I'd rather die standing in front of a mob screaming bloody murder with a weapon in my hands than be ruled in this way.

As it stands, I don't work for bosses whose politics I don't like. I quit. Always have, always will. If I don't like what a group is doing, I don't give them one iota of my strength. In the absence of a system that grants any individual real political power, sometimes the best a person can do is refuse to be of any help.

Americans have always been such a bunch of hypocritical cowards. Joseph McCarthy didn't teach you anything, and the rest of the world is still dealing with your failure to take responsibility for your country.