Search

Search this site:

E-voting and paper-based-voting - UNAM teaches us how to achieve the worst of all worlds

As my Institute’s sysadmin, I was appointed as the responsible for my Institute’s certificate handling for today’s voting session for the Universitary Council (Consejo Universitario</a>).

UNAM, Mexico’s largest University, is moving towards an e-voting platform. I talked about this with our (sole) candidate for the Council, and she told me this has been used a couple of times already - And, as expected, it has led to having to repeat voting sessions, due in part to e-voting’s inherent lackings: It is impossible to act on any kind of impugnation. The only thing we have is an electronic vote trail, no way to recount or to make sure that all votes got in. Besides, we had a perfectly antinatural and inadequate identification system, which means voter’s identity have no way to be trusted.

Besides, we still have all the traditional Universitary bureaucratic paper flow, which completely obscures any positive points this e-voting system might have had.

Before going any further, if you are interested: There is a so-called security audit certificate for this system. In Spanish, yes. Take a look at it if you understand the language and want to crack some laughs.

I will not make a detailed review of (what I could gather about) the setup. But to make things short: I had to go to the central administrative offices to get a CD-ROM with the monitoring station’s SSL certificate. This certificate is tied to an IP address, so only one computer was able to be set up as a monitoring station. So far, so good.

But, what is the monitoring station’s real role? You will probably laugh. The voting session (at my Institute - Each dependency can specify its own opening and closing times) was from 10:00 and until 18:00. We were instructed to place this computer at a public location, from where: