Re: [ALSC-Forum] Feedback on Draft Report

[Kent Crispin]

On Thu, Aug 30, 2001 at 08:17:30PM +1200, DPF wrote:
[...]
> >I'm sorry, but you simply don't comprehend the problem.  Having mail
> >from the same postal address might be perfectly OK -- my wife lives with
> >me, after all.  But so does my canary, and my dog, and maybe 15
> >imaginary people.  All of them can have email addresses and legal postal
> >addresses.  A legal postal address is essentially no protection against
> >fraud. 
> 
> Many people would invent fraudulent people (as we see on the GA list)
> if the only ID needed is an e-mail address.  Having to also provide an
> actual postal address which means you can be more easily tracked down
> for fraud is a big deterrent.
> 
> I agree that one would allow more than one person per postal address
> but with a bit of common sense one can concentrate on the more likely
> fraud cases which might be more than five voters per address.  
> 
> Still not perfect but for that case neither is restricting it to
> domain name holders.  Not at all hard to register domain names under
> fake names either is it.

You still are very far from understing the complexity, I'm afraid.  Many
uses of the same postal address are in fact perfectly legal - in fact,
many people may prefer to use a company address.  You can *suspect*
fraud, but you can't actually do anything about it.  If 500 email
addresses are associated with a single address in Bejing, how do you
check?

In fact, I used to think like you do, and, when I was a member of the 
MAC or MITF, or whatever it was, I was in favor of the postal address 
verification scheme.  But working on the election quite changed my 
mind:  it never pays to understimate how clever people can be.

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Be good, and you will be
kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain