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Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

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Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

#11
post #3

Creative Commons-licensed, written in Python using vim, shared on Github. It ticks all the boxes, just sad that the README is empty. Unless I'm mistaken, I can't find any tests though. Maybe they didn't release it, but it's a bit worrying.

Is the editor a program is written in really a criterion you evaluate software against?

It's an interesting observation.

Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

#12

No matter how open the code is. It is extremly hard, if not impossible, to ensure this code is running on the actual systems. E-voting sounds intersting in theory, but in practice it is basically not worth the trouble. It is way more complex than a regular system with ballots and the only gain is that the results can be published sooner.

The main gain is that people can vote from home, from abroad, or from work. Which increases turnout (especially among young and busy people). However, I'm not sure if the risks are worth that convenience.

Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

#14
post #5

How does a voter or independent voter know that the code that has been verified is actually running on the machine that they connect to? You have to trust the sys admins. And as we all know: something is trusted if it can break your security policy.

All voting systems that I know of require trust, with or without machines. Do you trust the person counting your ballot to count correctly? There's a district in the UK that prides itself on always being the first to return results. I would be fairly worried about the ballot counters there. Eventually someone has to trust someone to execute correctly. Unless there's some voting system I'm not aware of that doesn't re…

the problem with e-voting is any single sys admin has hugely more influence than any single human ballot counter.

Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

#15
Sadly many of the identifiers are named in estonian. Limiting this project to estonian developers only. I'm aware that this is _estonians_ voting system, but i'm sure there are developers all around the world who would be interested in contributing (especially security audits would be interesting) to this project without the necessity to reverse engineering/translating the code.

Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

#17
post #8
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with that last sentence though. It's not more complex because you don't need to spread booths all around the country, get volunteers to sit a whole day at the booths, secure the ballots, count the ballots, recount the ballots, etc... It takes a lot of logistics to do papervoting and it's probably more expensive too, compared to a centralized datacenter. They probably still have booths for people without…

The UK has had problems with fathers using the votes of everyone in their family via postal voting. I'd be interested to see if electronic voting fixes that, or makes it worse.

It fixes it somewhat, depending how far the person will go to claim those votes: iirc you get a week to vote, and the last vote you make counts. So even though your father might stand next to you and watch as you vote for his candidate, you can always recast your vote later. This doesn't solve the problem in case the person keeps an eye on you from the time you voted until the deadline, or steals your ID card until after the deadline.

Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

#18
post #5

How does a voter or independent voter know that the code that has been verified is actually running on the machine that they connect to? You have to trust the sys admins. And as we all know: something is trusted if it can break your security policy.

All voting systems that I know of require trust, with or without machines. Do you trust the person counting your ballot to count correctly? There's a district in the UK that prides itself on always being the first to return results. I would be fairly worried about the ballot counters there. Eventually someone has to trust someone to execute correctly. Unless there's some voting system I'm not aware of that doesn't re…

[deleted]

Re: Estonian E-Voting Source Code Made Public

#19
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All voting systems that I know of require trust, with or without machines. Do you trust the person counting your ballot to count correctly? There's a district in the UK that prides itself on always being the first to return results. I would be fairly worried about the ballot counters there. Eventually someone has to trust someone to execute correctly. Unless there's some voting system I'm not aware of that doesn't re…

There are theoretical cryptographic systems where each voter can verify that his vote was counted properly, without revealing his vote to anyone. I don't think any have been implemented in practice.

The voters can check their votes by following method:

http://www.vvk.ee/public/Verification_of_I-Votes.pdf

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