http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=221802

I voted twice for beer in that voting booth to to test whether the voting system tracks people's id, or something like ip.

Seems it is the ip.

But I know probably you don't like the idea of tracking login id, as it breaks privacy.

Is there any other alternative way? .

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: A little sugegstion about our voting booth
by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on Dec 23, 2002 at 04:53 UTC
    I'm not familiar with the voting booth feature. But I do recall reading about voting in Applied Cryptography. There are ways to ensure that everyone has voted only once, without revealing how you voted. I suppose it's doing that: noting that the IP voted for =something= but not recording what. If you gave everyone a ballot with a serial number and a digital signature, then each ballot could only be used once, but that only opens up more problems, like how do you give everyone their ballots and how do you prevent people from selling theirs? That's no different from a paper-and-box election, though.

    I guess tracking a dynamic IP is unfair to other people on your same provider, who might be locked out because you voted first.

    Schniner concludes that there is no perfect and general solution that fills all the desired features.

    —John

Re: Voting Booth Suggestions
by cjf-II (Monk) on Dec 23, 2002 at 04:49 UTC
    Is there any other alternative way? so that it is fair, and yet it is anonymous.

    Track by IP and login. Only record whether or not a user has voted, not what they voted for.

    Mind you, there's no real importance to the polls, so I wouldn't worry about it too much :).

Re: A little suggestion about our voting booth
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Dec 23, 2002 at 16:02 UTC
    The problem's we wanna let anonymonks vote too. The IP lock is released fairly soon btw - within a day or something, I'm not sure. There is really no good way to handle open polls on the internet - it might be possible if you need such a thing by identifying people by their PGP key or such, but that makes voting such a large effort that it only works when you have a real motivation and substantial reason for having to prevent ballot stuffing.

    Makeshifts last the longest.