[pp.int.general] Online voting versus online discussion

[Zbigniew Łukasiak]

On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 7:12 PM, Charly Pache <charly.pache at gmail.com> wrote:
> I heard about an e-voting system where people get a checksum when they
> vote and then the database of all e-votes is published, everyone can
> download it and check both the global result (with many different
> programs, developed by political parties, citizen associations,
> medias, the open source community, other individuals...)  and whether
> it's really what they voted that was taken into account. This way,
> there will be no more this software issue, it's transparent,
> verifiable, secrecy of vote is guaranteed. It's based on
> maths/encryption and not on software. Has anyone more information on
> it?

I believe that this is not possible.  The system can always record
your vote and no matter what cryptography you use - if that vote
result is a ++ on a candidate then this can also be recorded.  This is
a simple truth that the administrator is the god in any computer
system.  What could be possible is a distributed system - where
breaking the secrecy would require collusion between administrators of
many systems.  This would require completely new organizational schema
- where you'd need to establish these independent organizations that
would administer this system nodes.
Zbigniew Lukasiak
http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/
http://perlalchemy.blogspot.com/