[Osx-nutters] : OpenVoting

[Patrick Coskren]

On Aug 10, 2006, at 6:40 PM, Arden wrote:
>
> On Aug 10, 2006, at 11:47 AM, Kevin Callahan wrote:
>>
>> <http://openvotingfoundation.org/tiki-index.php?page_ref_id=1>
>
> Absolutely! Transparency is essential to a true democratic process.  
> I still believe the secret ballot is wrong for public elections.  
> See;   <http://www.onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/ 
> article_114.shtml>.  The secret ballot is needed for non- 
> governmental elections for workers unions but voting for public  
> officials is quite a different matter. It is a cultural belief that  
> secret ballots are necessary and a complete myth.

It's to make it harder to coerce people into voting a particular  
way.  If the ballot is secret, then you can just lie about who you  
voted for.  The history of Western democracy has enough examples of  
political violence that I think secret ballots are pretty important.   
The article you reference acknowledges that point, but doesn't  
effectively rebut it.

There are other ways to prevent voter fraud, as long as the voter has  
a way to verify that their own vote is what they intended.  With  
mechanical voting machines, that's relatively easy, since the user  
sees which hole is punched, and the mechanical device can be  
inspected by any party to the vote to ensure it wasn't tampered  
with.  This is the problem with digital machines: it's too easy to  
tamper with votes after the election, and too hard to verify the  
machine, and I believe the Open Voting Foundation folks are  
addressing both concerns.

-Patrick