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What happens if someone covertly breaks the seal on a box with the intention of simply invalidating the ballots inside? In some areas, votes tend to go one way
by timsally 15y ago
What happens if someone covertly breaks the seal on a box with the intention of simply invalidating the ballots inside? In some areas, votes tend to go one way or the other depending on the time of day. You might be able to exploit this fact and attempt to invalidate boxes that favor a particular party.
- sirclueless 15y agoYep, this is an endemic problem with end-to-end verifiable elections everywhere: it is easy to invalidate whole segments of votes. For example, in the wombat voting scheme, if one of the people who holds a decryption key refuses to divulge it, perhaps by "losing" their key, they can invalidate the whole election. Typically to minimize the chance of this happening you make sure that everyone with a key has a strong commitment to the election and make not divulging the key a public shaming event. "OMG, the Democratic Party refuses to decrypt the vote in this Republican-dominated area -- they must be corrupt!" It's an awfully sticky situation, because the A (availability) in the CIA principle is so critical in elections, where it typically is compromised the most in encryption schemes. (i.e. Quantum Key Distribution ensures that Eve can't listen in on communication, but doesn't do much to stop Eve from making communication impossible).
- Hellcat 15y agoWombat is using threshold cryptography. Threshold cryptosystem, works like this (in short), in order to decrypt an encrypted message a number of parties exceeding a threshold is required to cooperate in the decryption protocol. Meaning, before the election has started a threshold is set, let's say there are 4 candidates, you can agree that 3 of the candidates is enough to decrypt the votes. Also... Don't forget the paper backup, you can simply count those.