Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: electronic voting in Japan
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Fri, 7 Dec 2007 11:11:13 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: "Izumi AIZU" <iza () anr org> Date: December 6, 2007 7:36:57 AM EST To: dave () farber net Subject: Re: [IP] electronic voting in Japan Dear Dave, My understanding is that e-voting had lost its credibility in Japan. In July 2003, one local election conducted e-voting in Kani-city in Gifu prefecture, but bad machine troubles happened and thecitizens brought this to the court. In July 2005, the Supreme Court decided thta the election result is void due to technical failure. Many cities are afraid of risking their election to unsecure system.
The latest agreement by three major political parties may change the siutuation, but I am not sure if that happens so rapidly. In cotrast, in Korea, e-voting is likely to be used for the next Generalelection. It is already used for primary election of the current presidential campaign, according to my friend working at the Institute for Korean Election Studies (IKES) under Korean Election Management Committee.
izumi 2007/12/6, David Farber < dave () farber net>: ________________________________________ From: Rod Van Meter [ rdv () sfc wide ad jp] Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2007 1:45 AM To: David Farber Subject: electronic voting in Japan Dave, for IP, if you wish... There is an article in today's Yomiuri Shimbun (Japanese edition only -- page one, actually) about the possibility of electronic voting in national elections next year. http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/politics/news/20071206it01.htm (try feeding it to your favorite online translator for a Dadaesque interpretation) Electronic voting machines have already been tried here, in a few prefectural (state/province) elections. Apparently, all of the major parties are in agreement on this. I just got a glance at the print version, which had a picture; they will be touch panel machines that offer you a simple choice, then I believe print out a sheet for confirmation and actual submission. I'm fuzzy on these details, don't quote me there; the online article doesn't really say. The article asserts that vote tabulation time can be dramatically reduced, which seems unlikely, since the Japanese system is already amazing efficient: results appear in as little as twenty minutes after elections, despite being hand-counted. There is a separate ballot for each office, so they can be quickly sorted into boxes based on vote, then the box is counted. (Don't ask me how they verify validity.) I asked some students about this, and one pointed me at a paper: The Security Analysis of e-voting systems in Japan Hiroki Hisamitsu, Keiji Takeda Carnegie Mellon CyLab Japan 1-3-3 Higashikawasaki-cho, Chuo-ku, Kobe city, Hyogo prefecture, Japan 650-0044 hhisamit () andrew cmu edu tkeiji () cmu edu Abstract To assess trustworthiness of e-voting practices in Japan, security of e-voting systems and their operational procedures are examined. Through these analyses we concluded that current e-voting security is heavily depending on protection by operational process rather than security feature of the system and it is confirmed that the systems provide only limited security feature though there is large room for technical improvement. Typical security issues are lack of protection mechanism of programs and data on counting machines and on tabulate machines. This vulnerability enables malicious poll worker or manufacturer to insert malicious code to generate arbitrary election result. >From the recent IPSJ Computer Security Symposium. The abstract is in both Japanese and English, but the paper is only in Japanese, unfortunately. --Rod P.S. I ran the Yomiuri article through Google's translator. It has gotten MUCH better recently (six months ago it was laughable and unintellible, now it looks like poorly-written English), and offers the user the original by hovering the mouse over a sentence, and even allows the user to suggest a better translation. Nice! ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- >> Izumi Aizu << Institute for HyperNetwork Society, Oita Kumon Center, Tama University, Tokyo Japan * * * * * << Writing the Future of the History >> www.anr.org ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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