More on digital democracies

[Kragen Sitaker]

Dave Long writes:
> > Making democracy stable in a virtual reality has several
> > special challenges.
> 
> > Solutions to pseudospoofing and tossers ... : ... make joining 
> > difficult, costly, and/or slow ...
> 
> Note that these were also the solution to making democracy
> stable in historical reality; the extended franchise is a
> relatively modern invention.
> 
> Spoofing and stuffing seem like they'd be a larger problem
> for virtual realities, but I believe there is a story about
> an election in GA that Carter won on appeal: it was just a
> bit suspicious that all of the dead people who voted for his
> opponent did so in alphabetical order.

They're still the solution to making it stable in modern reality, I
think; thus the minimum-residency requirement for registering as a
voter in essentially all US districts.

I think we try to prevent pseudospoofing as well --- I signed up to
vote when I got my driver's license, and I would have a hard time
signing up to vote that way under multiple names.  (Not impossible,
certainly, but difficult --- and especially difficult to do on a huge
scale.)

Dead people voting is a spoofing problem, or perhaps a
ballot-box-stuffing problem.  Avoiding virtual ballot-box stuffing
requires that the ballot box be hosted on a trusted machine, I think.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we ourselves
possess.
                -- Gandalf the Grey [J.R.R. Tolkien, "Lord of the Rings"]