The Cellar - THEY are tampering with the election

A software developer talks about a requirements spec for voting

Quote:

One requirement is that the results of an election must seem legitimate. That's why responsible candidates have a "concession speech" when they lose. When John McCain lost the election to Barack Obama, he started his speech with:
"My friends, we have come to the end of a long journey. The American people have spoken, and they have spoken clearly. A little while ago, I had the honor of calling Sen. Barack Obama — to congratulate him on being elected the next president of the country that we both love."
This was important. Many of his supporters were pointing out irregularities in various states, wanting to continue the fight. But there are always irregularities, or things that look like irregularities. In every election, if a candidate really wanted to, they could drag out an election indefinitely investigating these irregularities. Responsible candidates therefore concede with such speeches, telling their supporters to stop fighting.
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Another requirement is that the rules be fixed ahead of time. This was the big problem in the Florida recounts in the 2000 Bush election. Votes had ambiguities, like hanging chad. The legislature come up with rules how to resolve the ambiguities, how to count the votes, after the votes had been cast. Naturally, the party in power who comes up with the rules will choose those that favor the party.
Even the most perfectly secured voting system proposed by academics doesn't solve the problem. It'll detect voter tampering, but doesn't resolve when tampering is detected. What do you do with tampered votes? If you throw them out, it means one candidate wins. If you somehow fix them, it means the other candidate wins. Or, you try to rerun the election, in which case a third candidate wins.
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Usability is a requirement. A large part of the population cannot read simple directions. By this I don't mean "the dumb people", I mean everyone who has struggled to assemble Ikea furniture or a child's toy.
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This leads to one of the biggest problems: voter turnout and disenfranchisement, preventing people from voting. Perfect election security doesn't solve this.
This distorts the elections toward extremes. As a candidate, you can choose either the "moderate" position, trying to win some votes from the other side, or you can choose the "extreme" positions, hoping to excite voters to get out and actually vote. Getting 10% more of your voters in the voting booths is better than luring 5% from the other side.

He has a lot more to say here.