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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

This is definitely going to be used as proof that Trump won in a landslide in 2020 and all of the poll watchers nationwide are in the (((Democrats))) pockets.

> some straightforward cryptographic scheme

Anybody who designs cryptographic systems is LOLing right now.

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I'm not talking about inventing a new method for encryption. I'm talking about something along the lines of:

* Every registered voter gets an encryption key

* When you vote, your vote is encrypted with the key

* A list of everyone who voted, along with their encrypted vote, is semi-publicly available (like current voter registration lists [1])

* Anyone can check who they're registered as having voted for (but the encryption keeps it private)

* Anyone who wants to verify the election results can request the voter registration list, and ask some randomly sampled subset to verify their vote

[1] https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/access...

The contradiction at the heart of the problem with cryptographically verifiable elections is that, if you make it possible for a voter to prove to others how they voted, you make it possible for their vote to be bought or coerced.

There are zero-knowledge cryptographic constructions that may theoretically allow you to prove things to a voter without allowing them to prove it to others. But doing this in practice with voters who aren’t cryptographers, and whose personal devices get hacked and stolen, has proved to be a difficult problem.

Your mention of personal devices getting hacked and stolen suggests you are only thinking of cryptographic voting systems that use electronic devices for the cryptographic interaction with the voter.

There are paper-based cryptographic systems for end-to-end verifiable elections. There are no personal devices to hack or steal in such systems.

See the links in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675726

I think existing systems like Helios have already solved this problem?

From the Helios paper: “With Helios, we do not attempt to solve the coercion problem. Rather, we posit that a number of settings—student government, local clubs, online groups such as open-source software communities, and others—do not suffer from nearly the same coercion risk as high-stakes government elections. Yet these groups still need voter secrecy and trustworthy election results, properties they cannot currently achieve short of an in-person, physically observable and well orchestrated election, which is often not a possibility. We produced Helios for exactly these groups with low-coercion elections.”

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec08/tech/full_papers/a...

Please state requirements before elements of a solution.

The secret ballot, also known as the Australian ballot, is a voting method in which a voter's identity in an election or a referendum is anonymous. This forestalls attempts to influence the voter by intimidation, blackmailing, and potential vote buying. This system is one means of achieving the goal of political privacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot

This has the downside that a person can prove how they voted.

This opens it to risk of bribery and coercion.

Right now, you can prove that you voted, but not actually how you voted.

> Anybody who designs cryptographic systems is LOLing right now.

Ron Rivest and David Chaum are rather well known designers of cryptographic systems, and I don't think they would LOL at crytographic voting schemes considering that they have designed one [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675726

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