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Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

blogs.microsoft.com

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Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#41

Post by mehrdadn »

Mindless2112 wrote: post #14
codedokode wrote: post #7

I don't understand how counting verification is achieved. Let's say that election officials release a list of hashed votes, so that you can verify that your vote has been counted and included into results. But how can you check that all other votes in the list are the votes from real people and not arbitrarily added by sysadmin to get the expected result? Does anyone know how such things are implemented? I have read…

Who voted is public record (depending on your state [1]), so the numbers should add up. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/04/us/politics/apps-public-v...

If John Doe is listed as having voted, but is fake, how would you know he's fake?

Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#42

Post by mehrdadn »

codedokode wrote: post #9
gruez wrote: post #3

>After the election is complete, the tracker codes can be used by voters to confirm that their votes were not altered or tampered with and that they were properly counted. So what's preventing vote-buying schemes?

In Estonian e-voting they allowed to change the vote later or re-vote offline. So that if someone sold their vote or was forced to vote, they can later change their mind. But such scheme is still vulnerable: for example, imagine if a large state-owned or having close ties with government company forces their employees to vote online under supervision. If the employees are not very good with computers or don't own one…

Isn't there a much more practical vulnerability? Just forcing people to vote in front of you in the last 15 minutes or something?

Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#43

Post by [deleted] »

atoav wrote: post #35

I shall repeat it like a mantra: voting beeing slow inefficient is a side effect of it’s transparency. You want a voting system were a average voting helper can look at it and say: “There was nothing fishy there, I saw it”. This is because it is about trust and not only about secrecy and security. Your electronic voting system can be mathematically perfect, but if nobody average can say from the outside that everythi…

[deleted]

Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#45

Post by Strilanc »

sideshowb wrote: post #39
atoav wrote: post #35

I shall repeat it like a mantra: voting beeing slow inefficient is a side effect of it’s transparency. You want a voting system were a average voting helper can look at it and say: “There was nothing fishy there, I saw it”. This is because it is about trust and not only about secrecy and security. Your electronic voting system can be mathematically perfect, but if nobody average can say from the outside that everythi…

Even a mathematically perfect voting system could be substituted in entirety. Replace the whole damn thing with your own one in an identical case running system.out.println("my favourite candidate wins! ");

The correctness of cryptographic voting systems is determined by their publicly observable behavior, not by their internal implementation. It's the protocol that's secure, not the specific hardware or software implementation. So the attack you're describing doesn't really apply.

Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#46

Post by sideshowb »

Strilanc wrote: post #45
sideshowb wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even a mathematically perfect voting system could be substituted in entirety. Replace the whole damn thing with your own one in an identical case running system.out.println("my favourite candidate wins! ");

The correctness of cryptographic voting systems is determined by their publicly observable behavior, not by their internal implementation. It's the protocol that's secure, not the specific hardware or software implementation. So the attack you're describing doesn't really apply.

Cool, thanks for correcting me there

Re: Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting

#49

Post by dagw »

mehrdadn wrote: post #41
Mindless2112 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who voted is public record (depending on your state [1]), so the numbers should add up. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/04/us/politics/apps-public-v...

If John Doe is listed as having voted, but is fake, how would you know he's fake?

There are also lists of who lives in a county/state/country. If you suspect foul play you can further look up if John Doe is a person that lives in the 'right' place. Of course this doesn't solve the case where John Doe is a real person that is allowed to vote, but actually stayed home.
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