You need to allow each voter to cast multiple fake votes, otherwise the briber/coercer could simply demand receipts for a fake vote in addition to the real ones. Could get a bit unwieldy. But the big advantage is that there's no extra complexity for the average voter, since they don't need to cast any fake votes.
- Voter 1 votes for Harker
- Voter 2 votes for Harker, gets the same UUID. The machine casts a vote for Dracula instead
It could also cast any number of fake/counter votes without the voter knowing.
Then again, this is also a problem with existing methods isn't it?
And the same goes for the people helping conduct the election. The ones who have to help with counting. I would rather have anyone above the age of 18 be able to count the votes without trusting corporations or complex open source programs. Let the community leaders and volunteers in under privileged parts of the country be able to simply count the votes. Otherwise we shut them out.
Just my two cents. Well written post though.
I've updated the post in a few places to help clarify this.
Especially because most people can understand at a visceral level why all paper ballots are fair, why over complicate what isn't broken?
I fail to see any form of discrimination here whatsoever. Voters don't have to understand anything about encryption, any more than today they understand how results get from their voting machine to the NYT home page in under an hour, which is just as much of a black box to most people.
And the trouble with people counting ballots, as always, is that it's error-prone (with recounts) and open to extreme manipulation to swing an election (as happens in many countries).
So a technological solution increases trust -- it doesn't decrease it.
And if you want to benefit voters from historically underprivileged backgrounds, well guess what -- election tampering is generally done to entrench a party or candidate in office for selfish gain, not the good of the country. And the poor and underprivileged are going to be the ones who suffer most from resulting police corruption, inflation, and economic mismanagement.
You can watch the box that the votes are put into, you can be present at the opening of the box, you can participate in the count. All the key parts of the process can (and in most countries do) happen in public view, and even someone with a low level of education can gain high confidence that the election is fair, trusting only other people like themselves - no need to trust the corporation that built the machine, or the politicians currently in power - you can watch it from empty box to published voting district results, and as long as you think there are people like you in each district doing similar checks, you can be confident the entire vote was done correctly.
But let's say the Input->Output is reproducible all the time with no chain between the voter and the result. You /still/ have no way to ensure that the checkbox corresponded with the name, and that you cast the vote you think you did. Perhaps this is outside the scope of the article, but its a fairly glaring deficiency.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding. But all you can tell with this system is that "your" ballot went into the magic box and a (presumably reproducible) result came out the other side.
You can't know which final ballot was your vote, but you can know that your ballot was in the mix coming in, and that the mix going out wasn't altered (within some probabilistic bounds).
I think this is the part I don't understand. Partly because I don't know anything about mixnets, and it feels like its paradoxical. But if that's how it is, then I can accept it.
Well the voter can verify if the voting machine is acting honestly by querying the salt used for encryption (refer to "How do you know your ballot was properly constructed?"). From an adversarial voting machine's perspective the chances of the voter validating the ballot is 0.5 and given the sensitivity of the elections, I'd imagine even one incident of foul play spreading like wildfire to raise alarms
- check in
- fill out a bubble sheet
- scan it
- declare vict'ry
Complex schemes are great intellectual exercises.
Just understand that perfection is unattainable.
We need enough automation for speedy reporting, without losing the secret ballot.
But the temptation to fetish technology past the point of diminishing returns, too, is a bugaboo.
KISS.
You fill in a bubble sheet, scan it, throw away half the ballot and take the other half as a receipt.
Later the user can prove their vote, but only to the election authority.
- a bad actor may lean on you about it
- recounts will be ridiculously costly
- a suitable ballot will be expensive to produce
When one considers all of the privacy/usability ramifications, just
- casting the ballot
- hearing a 'thunk' inside the DS200 machine
- having zero connecting information
. . .is more or less optimal.
This confuses me. Is it difficult to shuffle the paper ballots without changing votes? Are we concerned that the ink my be moved from one circle to another circle or something?
If we just directly decrypted them and published the results, they would allow someone to prove who they had voted for.
So instead, we shuffle them to anonymise them, then decrypt them to avoid being able to link an encrypted input vote to an output vote.
In a chad-based system though, the vote might actually change as the ballot was being physically handled.
This is not true. Scantegrity was an excellent voting system implemented in a real, binding US election. It is also (relatively) easy to use and requires little modification to a traditional ballot-based voting system.
https://www.chaum.com/publications/Scantegrity-II-Municipal-...
A 3rd party could verify each person then sign each vote but then that 3rd party can mint valid votes. And if you have a trusted 3rd party then why do you need a complicated voting system?
...and a good argument as to why paper ballots are still the best known voting system. Every other proposed solution is too complex.
At this point, paper ballots, and human processes are the best hope in America.
Doesn't account for the data leaks caused by ballot processing, which eliminate the secret ballot.
With paper ballots cast at poll sites, voters sign prior to being issued a ballot. This order is preserved (in the elections I'm familiar with). With the Australian Ballot, dropping the ballot into the box is the secure one-way hash which (mostly) anonymizes the ballots.
With postal ballots, even more care is required. Returned ballots arrive in bins. So its very likely that your ballot is the only one from your precinct in that bin. Making it trivial to tie that ballot back to you. The mitigation is to sort ballots by precinct prior to processing. Which is not easy or feasible, because ballots are generally processed as they arrive. This loss of secrecy is quite surprising to first time observers to how an election board works to certify elections.
--
Source: Burned out election integrity activist. I actually got some minor laws and procedures changed. Plus poll worker, judge, observer for about a decade. It took me forever to get up to speed on election administration and I'd say I know maybe 20% of what I'd need to know to do the job. There are so many nooks and crannies, and it's always changing, and every where has its own quirks. Meaning election administration is surprisingly difficult and arcane. So it's very hard to have casual constructive conversations about this stuff.
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PS- Chewing on this article a bit more more. Two things.
#1
Huge shout out for this point:
"5) The salt is crucial for ballot secrecy – since there a finite number of permutations of the ballot, without it, an adversary could determine the contents of a vote simply by enumerating possible ballot permutations and matching the resulting cipher texts."
THANK YOU!
This is so hard to explain. Especially to crypto advocates.
Back when I studied the available crypto voting systems, manually simulating a real world election, I stumbled upon this realization.
Any one advocating a new voting system HAS to clearly state the operating parameters, assumptions. Number of voters, precincts, contests per ballot, etc. And be very clear for when their system NO LONGER WORKS.
#2
This article does mention shuffling. I'll admit that I haven't followed the advances this last decade. I'd want to verify that "shuffling" is one-way (irreversible) and not simply hashing (hash collisions).
No one will be happier if someone figured out how to preserve private voting, public counting (Australian Ballot).
