Naveed Yaseen replied on Sunday, March 11, 2012 05:34 PM
Lahori, your demand of holding ballot in public is valid. But having seen several ballots held in public, I feel there is still a significant room of corruption even in public ballots. Because almost all such ballots are fashionably conducted by 'computer', which puts a big question-mark on integrity of ballot because very few people are allowed to verify the integrity of balloting computer and balloting software.
Computers are very obedient slaves of humans, only as honest as their masters want them to be. Computerized ballots can be easily manipulated by the admin of balloting computer or developer of the balloting software. In our dear country barely a penny room of corruption ever gets spared let alone billions of rupees at stake in ballots, so many ballots are rigged.
Being a software developer, a few years ago I proposed that computerized balloting should be divided in two transparent parts...
1) A manual part of traditionally balloting a small number, say 16 digits, possibly by dices or paper.
2) And an open-source software part which produces different plot-to-owner lists depending upon the 16 digits input number. Given the same input number, the software must always produce same plot-to-owner list. But given only a slightly different input number, it must produce entirely different plot-to-owner list. And owing to 16 digits of input number, the software can produce trillions of different plot-to-owner lists.
So this software can be thought like a rack of trillions of possible plot-to-owner lists.
And manual balloting of 16 digit number can be thought as randomly pulling out one plot-to-owner list out of trillions of such lists.
The process would go like this....
People could download the software part on their own computer/mobile before ballot. They can test the software with different input numbers to see it gives fair chance to them and every participant. IT professionals can also examine the openly published source-code of software to see there is no hanky-panky in the software.
Then on ballot day there would only be a manual ballot of 16 digits, possibly by dices and chief-guests' choice.
Then everyone could simply put those 16 digits in their previously downloaded copy of software and it would produce exact same ballot results on their computers/mobiles everywhere.
This way the ballot would be...
• Random enough to ensure fairness
• AND transparent enough to easily verify validity of randomness
• AND fast enough to be completed in few minutes (software part would only take few milliseconds)
If any real estate developer is interested in using transparent balloting software, I can voluntarily make it without any fee. I can be reached at my email |
