>From: "Curtiss Leung"
>
> > In Australia (about whose electoral system I'm completely ignorant,
> > as befits an American), that may be so. Alas, our wonderful Electoral
> > College makes it a matter of perhaps a few thousand votes in a perhaps
> > a single state.
>
>Bill is wrong; in Australian federal and state elections there are often
>times when a seat is won by only a handful of votes. The late great Frank
>Hardy liked to remind people of the many, many ways in which "democratic"
>elections could be subverted, the basic rule being: "vote early, vote hard
>and vote often" ;-)
What's that got to do with anything? In Australia a particular seat may be won or lost by a few votes, though rarely an election. The last time an election was won by a few votes in one seat was in the 60's, when the conservative candidate Jim Killen scraped in with Communist Party preferences. That wasn't about fraud though, simply a particularly close election, a fluke.
Anyhow I wasn't talking about Australia (where electronic voting is not even on the political agenda, the existing paper ballot system being quite satisfactory) but the US, where the electorate is ten times as large. And I wasn't talking about an election hinging on peculiarities of an election system, or the vagaries of a particular electorate, but an election outcome being manipulated by systematic electoral fraud.
>I can't see how can any electric or electronic voting system ever be as
>secure and private as ink on paper.
Don't be silly, the paper ballot system is less than 100% secure as well. I've never had an official check my identity before handing me a ballot. They just take your word for it and hand you a ballot paper. I once walked out of the polling place with the blank ballot in my pocket and handed it to a young fellow outside I'd been chatting to, who seemed eager to vote even though he was too young to be enrolled. It would be quite easy to vote multiple times, by going to multiple polling places (casting an absentee ballot) and having your name crossed off the roll in different places. And plenty of people are known by their friends and families not to vote at all, so others could easily vote on their behalf.
No electoral system is completely foolproof against such minor rorting, all sides tend to indulge in it on the margins, but its hard to do it on a scale large enough to be both safe and effective so all sides roughly cancel each other's rorts out.
Systematic fraud is a different degree of risk and that is, quite plainly, what I was talking about. It was also the context for the discussion - whether electronic voting has the potential to be more vulnerable to systematic, large-scale, centralised, electoral fraud.
I clearly demonstrated that adequate safeguards to minimise the risks can be put in place.
It is intellectually dishonest to attempt to counter this by pretending I was talking about insignificant fraud here and there. Which no system, electronic or paper, can be foolproof against except by methods which would be so cumbersome and intrusive as to interfere with the smooth running of an election.
In short, I wasn't wrong in the context. Unless you pretend I was saying something else entirely. Which you did.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas