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Re: SB08-240 fails

On Fri, May 02, 2008 at 05:24:11PM -0600, Margit Johansson wrote:
>  Earlier in the day,
> Harvie told me he was actually for the bill.  I guess he wasn't moved by my
> quoting the Report, because after I spoke, he jumped up and said a few
> words favoring the bill!  I first encountered a voting activist in favor
> of using the internet in elections a couple of years ago when trying to fight
> the bill allowing internet return of voted ballots for overseas military; at
> that time Neal McB said he was for that.  I am interested in learning more
> about the rationale for such opinions.  Should we could make that an agenda
> item at our next CFVI meeting?

What?  Margit, I've never been for returning ballots over the
Internet.  I certainly publicly opposed UOCAVA.

I've been spending my available time working with folks here and
around the country on auditing and haven't studied SB08-240.  I don't
see anywhere that the SERVE folks actually analyze the registration
part much.

I do think that there is an enormous difference between voting online
and doing other election-related things online.  The big difference
between voting and registration is that voting must be anonymous, but
registration is not anonymous - in fact it is a public record.  So
there are many techniques to deal with problems in registration.  We
are familiar with them in our online financial dealings: mailing
notifications to postal addresses, audit logs which can document
everything that everyone did, with all identifiers present, random
telephone followup, etc.

I have no idea if SB240 mandated those things, or if the counties
could do them securely.  But the existing online financial world
demonstrates that it can be done pretty securely.  And of course that
there can be problems.  Making it easier to register would be a good
thing, but I don't know how much this would have helped.  Making the
tradeoff can be hard, and I don't know where I would stand.

But again, voting anonymously over the internet is insanity, as the
SERVE folks said.

Neal McBurnett                 http://mcburnett.org/neal/