[Osmf-talk] Articles of Association Update 2.0

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

> Am 24/lug/2014 um 11:58 schrieb Oleksiy Muzalyev <oleksiy.muzalyev at bluewin.ch>:
> 
> I worked once as an observer at political elections. We were counting paper ballots up to 4 o'clock in the morning. I remember I was thinking: "This is wrong. Too much manual labor. There should be a machine."


yes, the idea is tempting for sure, but the practical implementations all suffer from intransparency (you will have to trust your government). There is also a lot of mistrust in the population towards these machines. Generally the small convenience gain for not having to count the votes manually (and publicly) is trade off for a lack of transparency.


> 
> Sometimes voters does not put down a clear cross, but write words,  leave ballots blank, etc. Representatives of parties discuss or argue over such ballots. Because cheating could be done with paper ballots too, for example, holding in palm between fingers a small almost invisible pen one can draw quickly a line over a ballot, what makes it invalid. I did not see it happen myself though, but I saw invalid ballots.


some people cast invalid votes on purpose as form of criticism.


> 
> I think there should be an open source machine, which could be verified.


you still need to trust that the software and hardware actually used are the same. There was a lot of research in this topic by the CCC
concluding that it was not worth using those machines, you can find some English texts and references here: http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English

cheers,
Martin