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Comment by nickpsecurity | Hacker News Reader

I'm doubting it. The reason is that they're both really hard to come up with and really hard for end-users to understand. That last part is important for widespread trust and verification. It's why I've always been in favor of centralized models with distributed verification. Especially simple computations that can just be re-run on available data with tamper-detection and comparisons of hashes, etc.

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You mean something as trustworthy and tamper proof on a large scale as paper ballots and manual tallying? I still haven't seen any electronics that can be practically verified by the public comparable with the centuries old manual solutions that anyone can follow. Using electronics means getting a massive TCB with many orders of magnitude less the number of eyes that can actually inspect the computations being run (both because of organizational reasons and lack of knowledge).

According to Halderman* it might take us 10 years, if ever, to get machines the public can trust and verify on the scale that is needed for nation-wide elections.

Given the sorry state of current phone and laptop security, the problem of having a massive TCB is not solved, not with building on Ethereum either.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY_pHvhE4os#t=58m55s

It's all in the protocol and implementations: you don't need to trust huge TCB's and manufacturing of specific device. Low TCB, diverse, clients doing the checking is all you need. The paper comparison is unfair given online and electronic is assumed in the requirements of the OP. Something closer to paper in usability, cost, or security would be:

http://www.scantegrity.org/

Scantegrity, like other secure electronic systems, scores low on usability[1].

Recently the CEO of Fox-IT reported a delay to our minister in the Netherlands[2] with researching the specs for a usable and secure vote printer and vote counter[3]. It's not as easy as people think, especially the elder seem to have trouble with it.

[1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/evtwote14/workshop-program...

[2] https://zoek.officielebekendmakingen.nl/blg-604665 (Dutch)

[3] Unofficial translated summary of the report on large scale voting; proposes using a vote printer and vote counter with human readable ballots in between: https://www.kiesraad.nl/sites/default/files/every-vote-count... (English)

Thanks for the data. I'll factor that into future comments. The direction that leads, though, is improve the usability rather than toss out the whole system or its principles.

My main recommendation if anyone asks with intent to deploy is paper and optical readers. Cheap, easy to use, easy to check at booth, and easy to audit later. I prefer computers stay out of voting as much as possible. However, if they're there, Scantegrity line and Civitas seem like top contenders to build on.

Also note in any analysis that secure voting has so many seemingly-contradictory requirements and attack points that any solution will likely pose difficulties. I expect some responsibility and effort from the system's users just like they must put effort into learning to drive. That said, the usability can certainly improve and we should put every effort into that.

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