Imagine you were at a voting place. You mark your vote on a piece of paper then hand it to a gremlin. The gremlin then takes the note into a gremlin box where no one can see him and compares the note to his secret naughty and nice list given to him by Santa. The gremlin is very loyal to Santa and always performs his bidding. Santa is a very jealous man and never lets anyone see his list. If everyone is on the nice list then the votes tabulate as you would expect. If someone is on the naughty list then the gremlin changes the vote so they lose. Either way, the gremlin eats the note at the end. At the end of the poll the gremlin tells you who won. Would you accept such a system?
Of course not, most people would say. Now the Gremlin is like a computer. And Santa's List is like a program. Santa is the programmer. If it is a "Good Santa List" then using the gremlin voting machine is no problem. However if you have a "Bad Santa List" then you have a very serious problem. Now we want to know, is there any way to prove that we only run Good Santa Lists on our Gremlin Machines? That is to say, can we prove that we are running only a good vote program and not a bad one?
The answer to this question is NO! We can NEVER know this.
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All you have to do is develop a voting system that is more reliable than a room full of humans. That's not quite as big of a burden as perfect is.
I've heard this argument as well. Let us analyze it from a game theory standpoint.
Let us have 2 systems.
System A has a MINIMUM error rate of less than 1% if done properly. System A has a MAXIMUM error of around 5%. System B has a MINIMUM error rate of less than 1% if done properly. System B has a MAXIMUM error rate of 1000000000000000000000000000000%.
Which one should we logically choose to count our votes? Obviously System A.
System A is hand counting the vote.
System B is computer counting.
(The above was snipped from a Technical thread on a Consumer Protection for Elections website, and NOT written by me, although I wish I had.)
Greg Bodovsky
Hillsboro--
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
Rev. Martin Niemoller, 1945
