Long Election Night

[davidn]

I think that this is the first time that I've stayed up to watch the results of the UK elections coming in - ironically, being five hours behind the country now helps with that, because they've been at it for about a quarter of a day now and one tenth of the available seats have been declared. The exit polls seemed to indicate that it was going to go pretty much as expected - the Conservative party getting a lot more seats but nobody having a majority.

Highlights so far have included:

• Just about everyone from the BBC News ever coming back for a gigantic sort of news end-of-series special
• Large numbers of people having been turned away because of not enough ballot papers or staff at the polling places - we were behind to America on this for many years, but it looks like we've finally reached their democratic standard
• The swingometer, which this year is being presented from the BBC holodeck
• Pax-Man being tough on everyone right from the start, from as innocent a question as just asking three party representatives what they thought of the exit polls
• One Labour politician almost managing to make it through an interview with him without being sneered at
• The reaction to Sadiq Khan retaining his seat

But most genuinely surprising was the complete non-appearance in the exit poll of the Lib Dem surge that was going to happen. They're still just about hanging on, but the numbers indicated it was far from a seat-grabbing bonanza and maybe even a couple of losses. We'll have to wait to see, but it looks like it's going to be a long time yet.

Comments

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

David: there is no way to ensure you can vote on the internet, while preserving secret ballot, is there?

Between printing screen, inability to judge no one's in your room, it seems absolutely infeasible to validate that an e-vote is genuinely the wish, without coercion, of the voter.

[davidn]

Well, the method of making sure nobody's looking over your shoulder at the physical ballot box isn't exactly all that high-tech a solution either... postal votes aren't above being tampered with, and there's no way to tell that it was genuinely marked by the voter without coercion either. I can answer the simpler concerns like print screen, of simply never actually showing the vote on-screen...

But votes by Internet seem inherently more insecure to me as well, and I'm supposed to know the ins and outs of making things like this secure... I can't imagine anyone actually doing it because people still have the idea that anything that's on the Internet is just floating there out in the open waiting for someone to pluck it out of the airwaves and run off with it.

[e-to-the-ipi.livejournal.com]

Well, you are supposed to have secret voting booths.

I've accidentally misclicked too many Go moves online to be sure of a particularly safe internet vote.

The fact there's nothing physical there makes recounts for confidence's sake a lot harder, too...