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The contradiction at the heart of the problem with cryptographically verifiable elections is that, if you make it possible for a voter to prove to others how th

The contradiction at the heart of the problem with cryptographically verifiable elections is that, if you make it possible for a voter to prove to others how they voted, you make it possible for their vote to be bought or coerced. There are zero-knowledge cryptographic constructions that may theoretically allow you to prove things to a voter without allowing them to prove it to others. But doing this in practice with voters who aren’t cryptographers, and whose personal devices get hacked and stolen, has proved to be a difficult problem.

heftig 4y ago
I think existing systems like Helios have already solved this problem?
- anderskaseorg 4y ago
  From the Helios paper: “With Helios, we do not attempt to solve the coercion problem. Rather, we posit that a number of settings—student government, local clubs, online groups such as open-source software communities, and others—do not suffer from nearly the same coercion risk as high-stakes government elections. Yet these groups still need voter secrecy and trustworthy election results, properties they cannot currently achieve short of an in-person, physically observable and well orchestrated election, which is often not a possibility. We produced Helios for exactly these groups with low-coercion elections.” https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec08/tech/full_papers/adida/adida.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec08/tech/full_papers/a...
tzs 4y ago
Your mention of personal devices getting hacked and stolen suggests you are only thinking of cryptographic voting systems that use electronic devices for the cryptographic interaction with the voter. There are paper-based cryptographic systems for end-to-end verifiable elections. There are no personal devices to hack or steal in such systems. See the links in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675726

heftig 4y ago

I think existing systems like Helios have already solved this problem?

anderskaseorg 4y ago
From the Helios paper: “With Helios, we do not attempt to solve the coercion problem. Rather, we posit that a number of settings—student government, local clubs, online groups such as open-source software communities, and others—do not suffer from nearly the same coercion risk as high-stakes government elections. Yet these groups still need voter secrecy and trustworthy election results, properties they cannot currently achieve short of an in-person, physically observable and well orchestrated election, which is often not a possibility. We produced Helios for exactly these groups with low-coercion elections.” https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec08/tech/full_papers/adida/adida.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec08/tech/full_papers/a...

tzs 4y ago

Your mention of personal devices getting hacked and stolen suggests you are only thinking of cryptographic voting systems that use electronic devices for the cryptographic interaction with the voter. There are paper-based cryptographic systems for end-to-end verifiable elections. There are no personal devices to hack or steal in such systems. See the links in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675726