EAC - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines

Name : | Warren Smith
Organization : | N/A
Post Date : | 9/30/2005
General Comments
Comment : | CRYPTOGRAPHIC PROTOCOLS: One of the hopes for the future of voting is to employ "cryptographic protocols" which enable certain mathematical guarantees about vote privacy and election correctness to be made. These schemes are based on "zero knowledge proof & verification protocols." They offer the potential for an immense increase in election validity and fraud prevention far above that ever previously achieved. The guidelines leave the entire subject unaddressed. I suggest formulating at least a definition of what such a crypto-secure voting system IS, and then offering to allow more powerful computers in voting machines satisfying that definition. The definition should involve votes being *private: a voter who wishes to keep his vote anonymous and secret should be able to do so (with mathematical certainty under cryptographic assumptions). Note: this means secret even from the machine which itself receives that vote (it receives it only in encrypted form). *valid: zero-knowledge proofs must be produced that the vote is valid *zero-knowledge proofs must be output by the voting system that only pre-registered voters voted and no double votes were used *the correct election result must be produced, with zero-knowledge proof of correctness