Cryptology firm cancels elections after losing encryption key | Hacker News Reader

Cryptology firm cancels elections after losing encryption key

bbc.com

18 pointstagawa21 comments

Previously: A cryptography research body held an election and they can't decrypt the results https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46020596

Ah, sorry. I'd only searched for cryptology and should've been more thorough.

It's the same story.

Previously:

A cryptography research body held an election and they can't decrypt the results - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46020596 - Nov 2025 (38 comments)

Some things just work, like paper ballots. No reason to re-invent the wheel or to "verschlimmbessern" what works.

We vote a lot in Switzerland on a lot of issues but we do so on paper ballots which we can either drop directly in the box or send in the post. When there is a close vote the maximum wait for a result is usually around 4-5 hours so that isn't really an issue either. Counting is a highly distributed effort and IMO that also reduces the risk for large scale fraud.

It absolutely doesn't work. All paper elections have some (acceptable and accepted) level of fraud. We should move to mathematical system, that still uses paper but let's the voter confirm that thier vote was properly counted. There was a TED presentation about this many years ago.

Evidence says it works. And evidence beats ted talks any second, to the constant surprise of the tech (or influencer) community.

Ok. If "works" means, "is good eonugh to be used for the purpose", I guess it works. But shamanistic medicine wokrs by the same measure so it's really not a high bar to clear.

Not really? Shamanistic medicine doesn't work.

Switzerland has the highest functioning democracy on the planet.

I guess, but I only guess, that if it's not happening in the States it means it's impossible and shamanistic. Kind of like universal healthcare, you know.

> Shamanistic medicine doesn't work.

It worked enough for people to be using it.

> Switzerland has the highest functioning democracy on the planet.

Somehow I think being completely secure in last two world wars contributes to the success of their high functioning democracy. Also, I thought we were talking about elections not democracy.

Democracy can work perfectly well even if the elections select completely random party to rule if all parties are good enough.

All these clever voting systems suffer from the problem that most people just don't understand it well enough to trust it.

Paper elections are simple and everyone understands them. The controls are largely that there are a lot of observers.

Trust is vital in elections.

I agree with you. the counter that some people make (that I personally disagree with as being a reason to not do it) is that anything that lets voters confirm that their vote was properly counted also enables 3rd parties to influence said voters (i.e. buying a vote is more valuable if one can validate that bought vote was actually delivered).

Personally I find other mechanism to heavily criminalize vote buying as being effective to discouraging that behavior and providing a slip of paper to the voter that enables them to post factor validate that their vote was counted as they believe it should have been to be much more valuable.

but its important to address the issue that some people have.

Given that votes are already bought for money (through political marketing) maybe it's not a strong problem to use technology that enables more direct and honest vote buying.

Who knows, maybe that's a road to equivalent of universal income. Being paid for your vote for one party or another.

This system was described in Spanish Beggars by Nancy Kress

Why does the IACR use the term "cryptology" rather than "cryptography"?

Cryptology is the science, cryptography the practice.

https://www.iacr.org/news/item/27138

It sounds like "3 out of 3" is too risky, as you're basically tripling the risk of losing a key (but you're reducing the risk of compromise). Something like "3 out of 4" would have been a better balance, in my opinion, but I think there were technical issues in requiring such a quorum (I think I read that the encryption scheme didn't support it, but don't quote me).

This headline is incorrect, elections were rescheduled, not canceled.

I guess it's my turn to post it -- https://m.xkcd.com/2030/

Like fine wine

Better than losing the key and finding a "workaround" I guess.

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