Skip to main content
Politics

Return to Answer

Post Merged (destination) from politics.stackexchange.com/questions/60038/…
Clarified wording as per comments.
Source Link
Paul Johnson
Paul Johnson
  • 21.2k
  • 7
  • 60
  • 87

The security issues in electronic voting are completely unlike any security issues anywhere else.

You have to provide assurance that every legal vote has been countedcorrectly recorded and added to the total of the candidate for whom it was cast, but at the same time prevent any voter from proving to a third party which way they voted. These two are fundamentally in opposition because if the voter can check that their vote is correctly recorded in the list of ballots then they can also do that in front of a third party who can then either pay them or beat them up accordingly.

Blockchain and its relatives do nothing to resolve this fundamental problem. Its possible that something might be done with homomorphic encryption (i.e. being able to run certain computations on a block of votes without decrypting it) but I'm not enough of a cryptographer to comment on that.

Paper ballots in the UK solve this problem by having each ballot paper stamped with a number, which is then recorded next to the voter's name, also on paper. In theory you could look through a stack of ballots and pair the ballot number against a voter. In practice this requires physical access to the ballots, and doing so for all ballots would be a large operation requiring lots of staff. So this is easy to prevent, but allows spot checks in case of allegations of widespread ballot stuffing.

The security issues in electronic voting are completely unlike any security issues anywhere else.

You have to provide assurance that every legal vote has been counted, but at the same time prevent any voter from proving to a third party which way they voted. These two are fundamentally in opposition because if the voter can check that their vote is correctly recorded in the list of ballots then they can also do that in front of a third party who can then either pay them or beat them up accordingly.

Blockchain and its relatives do nothing to resolve this fundamental problem. Its possible that something might be done with homomorphic encryption (i.e. being able to run certain computations on a block of votes without decrypting it) but I'm not enough of a cryptographer to comment on that.

Paper ballots in the UK solve this problem by having each ballot paper stamped with a number, which is then recorded next to the voter's name, also on paper. In theory you could look through a stack of ballots and pair the ballot number against a voter. In practice this requires physical access to the ballots, and doing so for all ballots would be a large operation requiring lots of staff. So this is easy to prevent, but allows spot checks in case of allegations of widespread ballot stuffing.

The security issues in electronic voting are completely unlike any security issues anywhere else.

You have to provide assurance that every legal vote has been correctly recorded and added to the total of the candidate for whom it was cast, but at the same time prevent any voter from proving to a third party which way they voted. These two are fundamentally in opposition because if the voter can check that their vote is correctly recorded in the list of ballots then they can also do that in front of a third party who can then either pay them or beat them up accordingly.

Blockchain and its relatives do nothing to resolve this fundamental problem. Its possible that something might be done with homomorphic encryption (i.e. being able to run certain computations on a block of votes without decrypting it) but I'm not enough of a cryptographer to comment on that.

Paper ballots in the UK solve this problem by having each ballot paper stamped with a number, which is then recorded next to the voter's name, also on paper. In theory you could look through a stack of ballots and pair the ballot number against a voter. In practice this requires physical access to the ballots, and doing so for all ballots would be a large operation requiring lots of staff. So this is easy to prevent, but allows spot checks in case of allegations of widespread ballot stuffing.

Source Link
Paul Johnson
Paul Johnson
  • 21.2k
  • 7
  • 60
  • 87

The security issues in electronic voting are completely unlike any security issues anywhere else.

You have to provide assurance that every legal vote has been counted, but at the same time prevent any voter from proving to a third party which way they voted. These two are fundamentally in opposition because if the voter can check that their vote is correctly recorded in the list of ballots then they can also do that in front of a third party who can then either pay them or beat them up accordingly.

Blockchain and its relatives do nothing to resolve this fundamental problem. Its possible that something might be done with homomorphic encryption (i.e. being able to run certain computations on a block of votes without decrypting it) but I'm not enough of a cryptographer to comment on that.

Paper ballots in the UK solve this problem by having each ballot paper stamped with a number, which is then recorded next to the voter's name, also on paper. In theory you could look through a stack of ballots and pair the ballot number against a voter. In practice this requires physical access to the ballots, and doing so for all ballots would be a large operation requiring lots of staff. So this is easy to prevent, but allows spot checks in case of allegations of widespread ballot stuffing.