Here's a timely story which happens to hit two of my hot buttons with a single stone, if you'll forgive the scrambled metaphors. ('You can't make analogy without breaking eggs', as my Grandma would have said). It's a BBC article about anonymity for 'at risk' voters.
As you may recall, I've blogged in the past about the lack of anonymity in our current polling process. This article raises two pertinent points:
First, it's a clear acknowledgement that our current system does not provide anonymity for the voter. Although (as Dave Levy pointed out in his reply to my previous post) the ballot slips themselves undergo a couple of hashes, based on random voter arrival times and then random allocation of ballot-boxes to ballot-counters, the fact remains that there is a link between each ballot slip and a named individual on the electoral register.
Second, the point about 'at risk' individuals being named on the electoral register will acquire greater significance the closer we get to a national biometric identifier - because those make it more difficult to give someone a legitimate alias. As has been pointed out elsewhere, there are a number of people who need such aliases - for instance, victims of domestic violence, witnesses under a protection scheme, intelligence operatives and so on.
As national electronic credentials become more prevalent, we should take every opportunity to compare best practice in e-voting and paper ballots, and guard against the risk that a basic assumption in one case is invalid in the other. To take a trivial example: think how easy it is to sort and re-sort the contents of a spreadsheet, based on one or other of its columns. All of a sudden, the 'hashing' I mentioned above in the UK ballot process becomes a trivial obstacle to detailed analysis of the poll results.
Spare a thought for all those poor MI5 operatives, though. I suspect that as the National Identity Register grows, more and more of them will be forced to become victims of domestic violence. Talk about a 'flag of inconvenience'...
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