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August 28, 2014, 06:32:40 PM

Thanks for the thought, but indeed I am profoundly uninterested on any vote-from-home proposal.  That is like a water-powered car or a gamma-ray fly killer: a bad idea in itself, independently of the technical details.  I will not waste time reading such proposals.

It's not clear to me why you seem to think that this technology could only be used to vote from home.

Not in general, but in many cases that is a necessary goal (because, if votes were to be cast only in special voting places, such systems have few advantages over the existing paper-backed e-voting systems, and several disadvantages).

People learn to trust technology they don't understand all the time, both from necessity and from convenience.  Most people don't understand ANY technology, really.

That is what the TSE always says: "if people trust ATM machines and home banking, why shouldn't they trust DRE machines"?

The point, of course, is that people do not trust those technologies, they trust the entities that manage them (the banks).  Customers believe that their bank is committed to preventing fraud and prosecuting hackers.  They believe that the bank itself will take good care of their passwords and will not tamper with their accounts to steal their money (since it has plenty of fully legal ways of doing the latter  Wink)

In an election, on the other hand, one cannot blindly trust the entity that runs the system.  The stakes are so big that, if insider fraud is possible, it will almost certainly happen.

More generally, people trust technology that they do not understand (from cars to smartphones), in the physical sense of not blowing up, because the experience of many people have proved them to be physically safe.  Such "empirical"' certification does not exist for e-voting systems.  

Well, the whole point of blockchain-based technology is precisely that it takes trust out of the equation completely.  I think maybe you really should read up on this and try to understand it - you are a CS guy primarily, right?

I realize that I resolved to leave you alone on this issue earlier, so now I will be true to my word.  I think there is really something here that you might find interesting if you would but deign to look into it seriously, but I will not press the issue further.