RE: [wg-c] re: Choosing the intial testbed

[Kendall Dawson <kendall@motif1.obs-us.com>]

My second and last post for the day -

At 09:57 AM 03/22/2000 -0800, William X. Walsh wrote:
>How will voters be validated, and how will we prevent voter fraud and multiple
>voting by the same people?   If you do it by email address, I can have a
>theoretically infinite number of votes, and I can easily write a small program
>to automatically vote using each of these infinitely possible email 
>addresses.
>If you do it by IP Address, then all I have to do is use the over 20 (and
>growing) number of Free Internet services and login multiple times to each one
>(and then to multiple cities, since the voting process is short enough 
>that the
>long distance bill for such calls would be short enough to be cost effective).

Sure, I understand what you are saying. The real world unfortunately makes 
us go out of our way to prevent abuse from thieves and malcontents 
everywhere. I don't know if you've been following the Arizona election or 
not - but it was the first state-wide legal public election. All these same 
issues came up - how do you validate people? how do you prevent fraud ? All 
legitimate concerns - but, yet they still voted.

Should we stop the entire democratic process - or stop trying to prevent 
abuse from the few rotten apples who continually spoil everything for 
everyone? My suggestion would be to take away the incentive to cheat. No 
matter WHAT you do - there is going to be some element of fraud. If you 
require enough information up-front - Name, Address, Email, Phone, and 
store it for the duration of the election - it will allow research into 
fraudulent voting. Any person/group/constituency/registrar/company caught 
trying to rig the system is not only instantly disqualified -- but 
penalized severely as well. Something along the lines of  -- "5 year 
probationary period you must wait before you can EVEN apply to be a 
registrar again".

Granted - nothing is perfect - and there will always be holes in the 
process. But, if you can eliminate 85% of the problems and calculate the 
margin for error - with a STRICT policy of monitoring, and enforcement. 
There is no reason that a public election could not take place.

>Idealism is nice, but practical reality has to be taken into account.

I agree that reality needs to be taken into account - but we cannot stop 
living our lives because there are some bad apples in the bunch. If we as a 
whole REALLY want something to get done - it will get done. And, we can 
overcome the obstacles if we put our minds towards the goal of solving the 
problems.


Kendall