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There are crypto-based voting systems that are very simple to understand, although not being entirely electronic: http://www.wombat-voting.com/ http://www.womba

There are crypto-based voting systems that are very simple to understand, although not being entirely electronic: http://www.wombat-voting.com/ http://www.wombat-voting.com/ By all means, there are different shades of grey. It should not be all black or white.

specialist 15y ago
Crypto-based voting systems are not designed to work for real-world elections. They work fine for contrived academic studies. They all rely on one's vote being lost within a herd of votes. So if your ballot is one of a million, and the ballots are simple with a few races/issues, it's easy to have a secure one-way hash with collisions. (The collisions make it impossible to work backwards to infer how each person voted.) Alas, real-world elections in the USA are administered at the precinct level. In my state, that's between 0 and 1000 registered voters. Further, a general election (November) ballot will have dozens of issues and races. So it's more than likely that any single ballot will be utterly unique. So with the voting systems I studied, it's trivial to infer how everyone voted. I could imagine crypto-based voting systems working for certain applications. Like corporate shareholder meetings. Or maybe Australian and British style parliamentary elections. (Don't hold me to the last guess, I only have cursory knowledge of their election systems.) Edit: I discussed these practical issues with one of the grad student authors of a crypto-based voting system. Being completely ignorant of real elections, he had NO IDEA what I was talking about. He denigrated my input; saying our elections should be easily tailored to accommodate crypto. (Good luck with that.) Maybe it's just me, but I'm of the opinion that people setting out to solve a problem should probably make some token effort to first understand the problem. YMMV.

specialist 15y ago

Crypto-based voting systems are not designed to work for real-world elections. They work fine for contrived academic studies. They all rely on one's vote being lost within a herd of votes. So if your ballot is one of a million, and the ballots are simple with a few races/issues, it's easy to have a secure one-way hash with collisions. (The collisions make it impossible to work backwards to infer how each person voted.) Alas, real-world elections in the USA are administered at the precinct level. In my state, that's between 0 and 1000 registered voters. Further, a general election (November) ballot will have dozens of issues and races. So it's more than likely that any single ballot will be utterly unique. So with the voting systems I studied, it's trivial to infer how everyone voted. I could imagine crypto-based voting systems working for certain applications. Like corporate shareholder meetings. Or maybe Australian and British style parliamentary elections. (Don't hold me to the last guess, I only have cursory knowledge of their election systems.) Edit: I discussed these practical issues with one of the grad student authors of a crypto-based voting system. Being completely ignorant of real elections, he had NO IDEA what I was talking about. He denigrated my input; saying our elections should be easily tailored to accommodate crypto. (Good luck with that.) Maybe it's just me, but I'm of the opinion that people setting out to solve a problem should probably make some token effort to first understand the problem. YMMV.