End-to-End Verifiable Voting With Prêt a Voter
- When?
- Monday 19 October 2009, 10:30 to 11:30
- Where?
- 39BB02
- Open to:
- Students, Staff
- Speaker:
- Mr David Bismark
Democracy depends on elections --- the people elect those to lead them and to make decisions for them. Any election is the difficult marriage of secrecy and verifiability in that we want all the votes to be secret so that no voter feels intimidated but free to vote according to her own heart and we want the election to be verifiable so that we can all rest assured that the outcome of the election does reflect the will of the people. Elections depend on people, procedures, software and hardware --- people stand for office, vote and count the votes and if, in the heat of the moment, they get a chance many of them would cheat to get ahead. To make cheating hard we have put in place procedures that have to be followed: the ballot box is shown to be empty at the start of election day and then it is sealed; ballots are cast into it one by one; at the close of the election the box is signed; it is safely transported to a counting place and only after checking signatures and lists is it opened and finally the votes are counted under close watch from election observers.
More recently voters around the world have been asked to trust that a computer does all these things without any real evidence of them actually doing so. Elections may fail and we may not pick it up. It may be possible for individuals or groups to cheat in an election, giving the victory to the wrong candidate, but regardless of the number of observers we have, it is impossible to be sure. We want independence from people, procedures, software and hardware. We want to be verifiable by voters, media, political parties and anyone else. What we really want is mathematical proof that the election outcome does reflect the will of the people. Because maths you cannot cheat. If you are thinking "we don't need that here!" then what about Afghanistan, Iran or the USA where elections have been disputed recently? We'll give the voter the power to check that her vote counts. We'll give anyone the power to check that the final tally is correct. While keeping the vote secret. There is no-one you have to trust, including the current government and system providers. No-one can know your vote including hackers, system operators and poll station staff. Cryptography is what makes this possible. From the author's TEDxStockholm talk in September 2009
