An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

Post by m-p-3 » Sat, Nov 12, 2016, 12:57 AM UTC

nickff wrote: post #44

iainmerrick wrote: post #40

There's a bunch of academic research in this area -- how to build an encrypted ballot box that lets you audit that your vote was counted correctly, but prevents anyone else from seeing what your vote was. However, a fundamental problem with any kind of online voting is that it doesn't prevent your vote from being coerced: https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2006/12/12/erosion-secret-ball... The best known way to do that is…

There is little evidence of voter fraud because nobody who wants to look for fraud is able to do so (due to many measures put in place to keep voting private, make it easy, and keep it simple), and as Feynman said "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". Evidence of fraud does exist, but it is difficult to discern whether it is the tip of an iceberg, or just an ice-cube.[1][2] Given the fact that presidentia…

Agreed. The best way to avoid fraud is to ensure it can't be done, and cryptography might be a valuable tool to enfore that.

Post by Findeton » Sat, Nov 12, 2016, 7:31 AM UTC

bn-usd-mistake wrote: post #59

Findeton wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contents of the ballot can still remain anonymous. You create a plaintext ballot, then you encrypt the ballot with the election authorities' keys, then you sign your encrypted ballot with your own private key (then you send the ballot to the server). You are signing a ballot that is already encrypted.

Unless I misunderstood you, the government would know who I specifically voted for in your scheme? That would be a huge no-go!

Yes, you misunderstood me. Imagine there are many election authorities, maybe perhaps every candidate has their own election authority. Each election authority creates their own public/private key and the public key of the election is created by joining the public key of all authorities.

Using a mixnet (note: Tor uses mixnets too), you can anonymize and decrypt the ballots while preserving the secrecy of the ballot. Not even the servers know at any point that you voted to Hillary/Trump, but the tally is done. And the whole process is end-to-end verifiable by any external party.

It's the magic of math.

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting

Re: An idea for encrypted, verifiable voting