Chaumian blinding & public voting?

Major Variola (ret) mv at cdc.gov
Fri Oct 31 10:10:19 PST 2003


Is is possible to use blinding (or other protocols) so that all votes
are published, you can check that your vote is in there, and you
(or anyone) can run the maths and verify the vote?   Without being
able to link people to votes without their consent.

Currently voting is trusted because political adversaries supervise the
process.
Previously the mechanics were, well, mechanical, ie, open for
inspection.
The current genre of voting machines.. well, you know the scam.
And still reliant on a few adversarial human monitors.

Something like this:
The day after elections a list of hex codes -votes- are published.  You
can find
 in that list the code that you received (on paper) when you voted, to
verify
that your vote counted.
You can run an algorithm on any subset of codes, including just
your own, and learn which candidate that code corresponds to.
Everyone can run on the entire dataset, verifying the tally.
You don't have to divulge which code is yours if you want it
to remain secret.  Perhaps the code could contain not only
the intended vote, but a unique voter ID so that hexcodes could
not be added to the dataset (cf dead people not allowed to vote except
in Chicago) without setting off alarms.
Perhaps anyone could verify that someone voted, or not, but could
not figure who they voted for without their cooperation.

Apologies if I should know this, I haven't gotten my head around
all the M of N, blinding, database translucency, etc protocols.





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