4 ms·

Not quite. Ok, I might be exaggerating with the CS Ph.D. requirement for the average voter, but there are two steps: 1) Verify that my vote was correctly encod

Not quite. Ok, I might be exaggerating with the CS Ph.D. requirement for the average voter, but there are two steps: 1) Verify that my vote was correctly encoded and cast as intended. Every voter must verify this. It can be as "easy" as: printing a hash produced by a voting terminal/device you trust (which doesn't need to be government provided), submitting the resulting encoded vote into a (untrusted) government website where you authenticate with a smartcard, and then later comparing your original hash against a hash published in a newspaper... This exceeds the level of sophistication/care of most voters in any large country. 2) Some organization must check a large trail of signatures, zero-knowledge proofs of correctness, re-encryption mixnets, etc, etc. This can be done well enough as long as every political party and election watchdog has one or two crypto professionals in their employ. I am not really worried about #2, even though it is harder, I am worried about #1. The important part is that all the checking of the world regarding #2 is useless without at least a representative subset of voters performing #1 (~1% would be enough, but only if distributed uniformly at random, otherwise you can flip votes from the population(s) least likely to check).

marcosdumay 10y ago
Yes, #1 is a bit too hard for everybody to do it. Yet, you can help some random set of your friends, while I help some random set of my friends, we add some neighbors at random, and much quicker than you thought, there will be a representative set of verified votes.
- lazaroclapp 10y ago
  No, you won't. You will get a representative set of "votes for voters who have at least one friend who went to college or had the resources to be a computer geek growing up". Then if I want to manipulate the election, I will just flip votes from elderly lower income voters in rural communities and likely not get caught at all. For an analogy: I grew up in Mexico during the 70 years PRI rule, and I can tell you in my city, in my polling station, with watchers from all major parties and a few ONGs, it is actually very unlikely that anyone stuffed the ballot. But in a rural area, where Spanish is not the primary language and the poll watchers were all from one party or few enough to be for sale... well... My point being that a similar scheme is quite possible when the barrier is "computer literacy" instead of "rights literacy" or plain old literacy (in the country's majority language, I mean). Either way, the smaller the group of people who understand how the election works, the easier it is to disenfranchise people.

marcosdumay 10y ago

Yes, #1 is a bit too hard for everybody to do it. Yet, you can help some random set of your friends, while I help some random set of my friends, we add some neighbors at random, and much quicker than you thought, there will be a representative set of verified votes.

lazaroclapp 10y ago
No, you won't. You will get a representative set of "votes for voters who have at least one friend who went to college or had the resources to be a computer geek growing up". Then if I want to manipulate the election, I will just flip votes from elderly lower income voters in rural communities and likely not get caught at all. For an analogy: I grew up in Mexico during the 70 years PRI rule, and I can tell you in my city, in my polling station, with watchers from all major parties and a few ONGs, it is actually very unlikely that anyone stuffed the ballot. But in a rural area, where Spanish is not the primary language and the poll watchers were all from one party or few enough to be for sale... well... My point being that a similar scheme is quite possible when the barrier is "computer literacy" instead of "rights literacy" or plain old literacy (in the country's majority language, I mean). Either way, the smaller the group of people who understand how the election works, the easier it is to disenfranchise people.