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Verifiable Elections Via Cryptography
An anonymous reader writes, "Cryptographer David Chaum and his research team have invented a new voting protocol which allows voters to verify that their vote has been correctly cast and counted. This is enabled using a surprisingly low-tech technique of cryptographic secret sharing. The secret — your marked ballot — is split into two halves using a hole punch" You take half home and can verify later via a Web interface how your particular ballot was counted.
Actualy if we all went and RTFA first, we would see that they have solved the problem. You can't prove how you voted to someone who didn't see the other half of the ballot you voted with.
By the way, why are so few posts getting modded up the last couple of days? In the article about melting arctic ice only 7 out of 250 posts got modded above the noise of the +2 posts and only 2 got modded to +4 or 5.
Of course, this doesn't prevent traditional vote-tampering methods from working, like
- TV commercials scaring voters about the other parties, or
- politicians making bogus promises, or
- dead people voting (as long as people with their names show up to vote), or
- election departments not providing enough voting machines or ballots at heavily-one-party-dominated precincts, or
- election officials invalidating registrations of people in the wrong party, or
- police harassing motorists in black areas on the way to the polls, etc.
But at least it's better than Diebold.Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Good lord! How is it that 70% of people have completely missed the point?
This system DOES NOT allow ANYONE to see WHOM you voted for.
That's right. NO ONE short of the people in charge can see who you voted for. You boss can't make you prove it, nor can your spouse, or whoever else.
All the ballot half you keep records is that you voted A, B, B, A. All you can verify online is that your vote was recorded as A, B, B, A. Because the ballot choices are randomized, no one can tell who A was for your particular ballot. Ahh, but I already hear the tin-foil brigade saying: "But the people in charge can check!!" Really, how? The ID # of your ballot isn't recorded next to your name in the voter rolls, I suppose someone who had access to all the decryption keys could fingerprint each and every ballot, but anyone who can get ahold of any of the paper ballots can do that now. Is it no less secure than any traditional method of voting, and superior in a vast number of ways. As long as a few percent of people check that their votes match what they recorded, elections will be a lot closer to tamper-proof.
How did so many people fail to figure all that out?
My rantings, only longer and with better spelling..
Yeah... This is one reason why we have a SECRET BALLOT. Its hard to sell your vote if you haven't got a receipt.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
If you had read the paper (it isn't complicated) you would know that
- you can only verify that the mark you made was the mark that was recorded, you cannot verify which option you marked
- the auditors (normally the candidates) randomly sample the ballots before and after the election in such a way that they can verify statistically that counting proceeded fairly without violating voter anonymity. The chance of k miscounted votes going undetected is 1/2^k, so just thirty miscounted votes will have less than one in a billion chance of going unnoticed.
What on Earth does this system have to do with touch screens?
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
Funny how in a government with a GDP of $11,000,000,000,000 it takes programmers working for free to make a system that is actually secure in order to maintain democracy..
Shame is the only thing I feel right now.
MABASPLOOM!
My district has roughly 650,000 voters in it.
Let's assume we have the best turnout in a non-Presidential election in the past 40 years: 54%. That's highly unlikely - no one's really contesting in my district (our guy's an old time shoo-in) - but who knows? People might show up.
54% of 650,000 = 350,000, give or take a few.
How long would it take to count 350,000 votes for something?
Let's assume a person can count 1 vote every 3 seconds. Count it out loud. "1. 2. 3." It's pretty slow, actually, but let's be fair: some of our more civic-minded people are also some of our eldest, and they're a bit slow.
So 1 vote every 3 seconds, that's 20 votes a minute, which is 1200 votes an hour.
350,000 / 1200 = 291 man hours.
In 8 hour shifts, that's 37 people. And considering my district is spread out over 30 towns, that's roughly 1 person per city - 2 for some of the larger ones. Find 37 more people and you've even got redundancy.
And that's if you want it done in one day.
How about the Presidential election? 2004 was considered a banner year for turnout. Number of voters? 122,294,978. We'll round it down to 120 million. Again, 1200 votes an hour: that's 100,000 man hours.
8 hour shifts, that's 12,500 people. Again, that's in 8 hours, reading 1 vote every 3 seconds. If you got it down to 1 vote every 2.5 seconds (and trust me, when things are repetitive, it's easy to speed through), suddenly you only need 10,417 people.
You've just laid off 2,100 poll workers in half a second.
There is no reason at all for a backlash against paper balloting. It is quick enough. In fact that should be the motto for all paper balloting:
PAPER Balloting: It's Quick Enough.(TM)
Simpler? How do you get simpler than putting a big black "X" next to your selection on a ballot and dropping it in a locked box? Lining up holes, encrypted receipts, there is NO NEED to make things this complicated.
Remember: KISS
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
There is a video on the website that explains how this works.
No, because...
If you READ THE POXY PAPER you would understand the auditing process. The candidates can audit 50% of the votes to check that they were counted correctly without violating voter anonymity. A single incorrectly counted vote has a 50/50 chance of being missed. Thirty incorrectly counted votes have a chance of 1/1,000,000,000 of going undetected. The voters themselves verify that it is their votes that are being counted.
Nah, see, what's really scary is the people who modded me up to +4 without reading the article. That's democracy.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I love it when people talk loudly about things they don't understand. There are a number of information-theoretic secure constructs in cryptography that are unbreakable no matter how much computational might you bring to bear on the problem. One simple example is Shamir secret sharing (and the many variants) where you essentially have a system of equations with fewer equations than unknowns, thus like one time pads, every assignment is equally likely to be the correct solution to the problem.
-30-
No, you open up the right side of 100% of the votes and the left side of 100% of the votes -- but you permute the votes so that they can't be lined up. This is why multiple mapping tables are used.
Yes, it does. All of the tables with the decrypted vote sides opened provide everything you need to tally the results. The only possible way to produce incorrect tallies is to slip some mapping tables in that don't match the ballots in either the right or the left-hand side. But the commitment and verification means that can't be done without the error being revealed (with very high probability).
It can be done as many times as you want, by as many people as you want, with whatever sort of hardware you want -- because all of the data needed to do it is published. You yourself could do it, with or without writable media installed. You just download the tables and total up the votes.
How do you know the result is correct?
And the real evidence that all of this is done correctly is that anyone and everyone who wants to can perform all of these mapping table verifications, meaning that if there's a problem, someone will scream about it. Just as important, anyone who does complain has all the information needed to be able to prove that there is a problem. If they can't, it's because there isn't one.
The only risk here is that the anonymity of the votes may not be quite as strong as we'd like. The integrity of the tallies is indisputable.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.