Election Officials

``No... it won't work,'' Rince declared. ``It's not going to work.''

``Why is it not going to work?''

``Because it's stupid. No one can do any form of voting over the Internet.''

``And why the hell not? We have the cryptographic modules in place, we have the specialised hardware all set up as well. And we have many hours of testing already done.''

``But it's not foolproof!'' Rince replied, exasperated. ``The testing was done, sure, but it was using a very specific set of assumptions that we don't know for sure holds in the real world.''

``Besides,'' Rince continued, ``I have reason to believe that it will not work in the real world after all. See what happened in the US? That didn't end well, did it?''

``Ah, but the US was not using the Internet to have a real-time tallying and check mechanism. Their machines collected the votes, and the results were tallied at the end of polling day, after which any form of dealing with discrepancies is virtually eliminated. With our `live' update mechanism, errorneous votes are discovered near instantly and rectified. All eyes can see the timely update of the votes, and is more transparent. Hell, we even log the TCP packets being sent about to ensure that we have an audit trail. And the best part is, we decouple the voters and the votes such that we cannot tell which of the five people in the booth actually voted for whom---we just tracked them as a whole.''

Rince sighed. He couldn't imagine why would anyone attempt to fix a system that wasn't broken, but that was the government for you. Always tinkering and trying to ``improve'' things, or at least, introduce new-fangled toys to justify the annual budget.

But he didn't have the power to veto any decision. Accepting the given, he made a mental note to file an official complaint and rebuttal the next morning.

(Based on an exercise generated by WriteThis - 2014-02-07 21:49:23)