On Monday 27 September 2004 21:33, Enrique A. Chaparro wrote:
On Fri, 24 Sep 2004 10:01:59 -0400
Second objection is:
Even if you were able to overcome the first objection (wich, in case
"b" above, will solve the issue for simpler methods), a secure system
requires _huge_ amounts of computing power (if you're thinking of large
scale elections, i.e. elections involving millions of voters)
Regards,
Enrique
There is no need, and I believe it undesirable , to have every individual vote
tallied at a central site (a mirror , disaster-recovery, site is not solving
the problem in question). A hierarchical system is appropriate.
furthermore while exit polls influence the election and so on we also do not
want local partial results disclosed. It may be desirable for updates on a
periodic basis to be forwarded as a 'sign of life'. The problem is that if
these intermediate results exist news agencies will want to publicize them
and that would influence the election in-progress. Already we have seen
partial dsenfranchisement and lower voter turnout in Alaska and esp.
Hawaii since the polls are open there after the polls in Eastern US close.
On a technical level each voting machine should tally its results. The next
level up is the Election District. Results of each voting machine are
summarized by the ED node and reported up to the location master node for the
polling place (again I leave out redundancy; we assume measures are taken for
reliability). The results of each polling place are grouped by county.
It is not clear to me that any state-level elected office has a district
spanning multiple counties. Similarly I do not believe that any congressional
seat spans state borders. Therefore it should suffice to tabulate state-wide
and federal elections on a county-by-county basis for each state at a
state-wide master node.
In short, as has been pointed out a tree approach makes the problem of vote
counting quite tractable.
