The plane is about to leave, so just a rushed note to see Boing Boing: Vote Save Error .
This incident is a problem on its own….but alas it also shows why we can't allow camera phones in polling places — it would allow people to prove how they voted, which makes vote selling and blackmail feasible. Which isn't the point the post meant to make.
It wouldn’t work to bar people from taking cameras into an election booth when a camera can be contained in a small pda. How on earth would you enforce that?
Here’s a better idea. Make it so that the screen that says who you voted for can be backed out of. In other words, make it to easy to create false pictures that show you voted a certain way.
–Rick Taylor
Rick, I’m skeptical of your argument here. It seems to me that any alternative system would have to rely on some event that tells it when a vote becomes irrevocable. That event might be the press of a button (or the like) or it might be the passage of a certain time interval. Either way, the voter can record that event. If the event is the passage of time, the voter can video-record that too.
The only way escape route I can see is to have the event happen in public, outside the booth, and have an election worker there, watching to make sure that the voter isn’t recording himself. Such a system seems pretty cumbersome.