Re: Boulder County DA Should Investigate County Elections Office, Instead

[Ralph Shnelvar <ralphs@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Nicholas:

On Fri, 10 Sep 2004 13:00:24 -0600, you wrote:

>Bravo Joe, on a well-written letter. I think your criticism is well 
>directed and your writing is clear.
>
>I want to address your third point, the identifiablity of ballots. I 
>know that we have been through this ad nauseum, but I'd like to bring it 
>up again without all the vitriole. I do believe that according to the 
>letter of the constitution, you are correct; any identifiable mark is a 
>violation. Obviously there is a good reason behind this -- to do 
>otherwise could compromise anonymity.
>
>We can dream up all sorts of ways that someone with enough time, 
>motivation, and access could link a particular person to a particular 
>ballot. In practice though, someone with all this time, motivation and 
>access could determine someone's vote even without any identifiable 
>marks. So while we can fight for the letter of the law, we run the risk 
>of appearing pedantic with such a narrow focus.
>
[snip]

No, Nicholas, you've got it backwards.

It used to be hard (but not impossible) to go backwards from an identifiable
mark to an individual.  What it would have meant back then (a mere 10 years
ago) is that someone would have to plow through the 100,000 paper ballots
cast in Boulder in order to do the identification.

The framers of the Colorado Constitution understood just how much a threat
even this remote possibility was and now is.



Today the situation is far different and much worse.

100,000 ballots are now scanned into a computer and the images are stored. 
If a black&white ballot can be stored in a megabyte then 100,000 back&white
JPEG's of a ballot can be stored in 100 gigabytes.

A 100 gigabyte drive can be purchased for about $100 and easily fits in a
coat pocket.

A relatively simple computer program could scan those 100,000 JPEG images in
a few hours for the identifying marks.

Now it becomes trivial for people to sell their votes and easy for an
unscrupulous vote buyer to determine if what the buyer paid for was actually
delivered.  All it takes is an unethical worker at the County CLerk's office
to make an extra copy of the scanned images and then tuck the extra disk
drive in the worker's pocket for sale to a vote buyer.

Very, very scary.

>
>Nick