Rick’s post reminded me of some thoughts on the same topic. Roughly speaking, identity can be broken into three categories. Say you go to a party and no one knows each other, you could reveal identity like this:

• Veronymous - you’re wearing a name tag
• Pseudonymous - you’re wearing a name tag with some made up name (e.g. Richard Bachman)
• Anonymous - you’re not wearing a name tag

People have a tendency to confuse veronymous with pseudonymous. A serial number on a ballot could be either, depending on how identity is protected.

A Diebold rep says to me “you can’t be putting a serial number on a ballot; it identifies you.”

I counter by saying the order ballots get stored in a DRE memory card can identify you too.

He replies “but they’re stored in random order.” Whoa now, don’t be taking the cryptographer’s lord’s name in vein. “Random” is a holy word.

People like to throw this word around, but this is a special word for people in the world of information security. So special in fact, that experts argue it doesn’t even exist. People often (erroneously) use it in the stead of “pseudo-random.” I won’t get into why this is (save it for another post), but…

In the end, ye who controls the entropy source knows the order the ballots get stored in memory. At which point you have pseudonymous identification (the “first” voter, the “second…”). If the poll worker was kind enough to provide you with an order that people signed in, you now have veronymous identification.

Not as anonymous as the average person might think. Yet they seem comfortable using it.

And at the same time carry on about serial numbers on ballots.

Well… all’s fair is fair: you can’t have it both ways. I argue that a ballot serial number is, at worst, equivalent to a DRE in terms of identifiability.

But in the end, there really is no way to be truly anonymous on a ballot. There will always be some fingerprint; human or electronic.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.