According to one Minnesota voter’s story:

A college student claimed it was all a joke when he put his vote in this fall’s presidential election up for sale on the Web auction site eBay. But prosecutors didn’t see the humor.

Back in 2000 there was a website specifically for selling votes, but that was taken down fairly quickly, too. Surely, a widespread black market off-shore shop might be possible, but succeeding with this sort of thing usually requires a confidential and limited approach.

The vote selling issue has always been interesting to me. Obviously, it should not possible to make a proof of sale, because that opens the system up to other forms of coercion. However, if you can’t confirm compliance, is there anything to worry about?

My opinion is that these laws should still exist, for two reasons. First, privacy is really hard to guarantee with a voting system, and you can still get lesser forms of “proof” (e.g. cellphone picture of ballot–can be faked but still might be enough). Second, I (weakly) disagree with the major argument that I have heard for vote selling, which is that candidates are buying votes with their positions and promises anyway. Otherwise non-voting voters affect the process for more interested voters. I think that anything that makes a voter change his vote other than the opinion of the candidate is probably wrong.

I am still writing part 3 of the secret ballot series, and I should be finished soon. Have a happy 4th of July!

Computer scientist and election technology analyst Avi Rubin touched on some familiar themes in an interview yesterday:

There are cryptographic techniques that can be used to achieve software independence so that even if there’s a bug in the software, you’ll detect if there’s a problem. But those are not ready for prime time in my opinion.

Though I’m generally more optimistic about this, it’s a fair statement, especially since there hasn’t yet been any definitive event to have changed many minds. The question I put to you, fair reader, is how do we recognize when the time has come? It would seem, as in Rubin’s case, a conservative assessment of the situation would best allow one to avoid taking a premature position on the matter.

I suppose there are only two factors to take into account. One is a stable convergence of the technology with a consistent, set of security ideals. However this by itself may be too abstract to be appreciated by the general public.

Naturally for me as an engineer, the defining characteristic of a technology entering “prime time” is its first successful deployment in the field.

But perhaps we can never say for certain the time has come, only that now is as good a time as any.