5 HN users recommended this explainer5 months2016–2024score 5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN commenters point to it in election-security threads as an accessible explainer of how a vote can be verifiable but not sellable.
Numberphile interviews cryptographer Ron Rivest about end-to-end verifiable voting. He explains how homomorphic encryption and receipts let a voter confirm their ballot was counted without being able to prove how they voted to anyone else.
“Cryptographers are clever and have figured out a way to let you know your vote was counted without being able to prove it to a third party!” (HN, 2024)
Andrew Appel (CS Prof. at Princeton) also gave a very good talk earlier this year about the problems of electronic voting systems. [link] edit: Also, Ron Rivest was recently on Numberphile, where he talked about using homomorphic encryption to enable end-to-end verifiable voting. [this video]
Ron Rivest on homomorphic encryption for verifiable voting
I find Rivest's video( [this video] ) on homomorphic encryption as voting mechanism quite interesting. It looks more secure than pen and paper. All user get a receipt which they can verify is same during vote counting. They themselves can vote count using all others receipt. At the same time, they can't sell their vote as it's encrypted.
Voter receipts verifiable without enabling vote selling
The mechanism for voter verification is based on homomorphic encryption. Numberphile made a video on this topic recently, with a few basic explainers: [this video]
Basic explainer of homomorphic encryption for voter verification
Right - the way you verify that is by asking for 100 sealed Alice envelopes, and opening 99 of them at random. If the machine was trying to trick you, you have a strong chance of catching it. You still walk out with a sealed envelope, and the would-be vote-buyer can't be sure it isn't a Bob envelope. This Numberphile video explains the process a bit more: [this video]
> I've seen many proposed implementations but they all fail because if I can prove my vote to myself in any way, someone else can make me prove it to them either to buy or coerce my ballot. There is a way to prove that your vote was counted without being able to prove what you voted for by using homomorphic encryption. So, if someone wanted to coerce you or pay you for voting at all for whomever you want, they could do it, but that's fine. Microsoft is actually working with Galois on a system operating on this principle[1], and here's a good video explaining the basic concepts of how it works[2]. [1] [link] [2] [this video]
Good explanation of basic concepts behind verifiable voting
Cryptographers are clever and have figured out a way to let you know your vote was counted without being able to prove it to a third party! [this video]
Verify your vote counted without proving it to others
@jjuhl answered that question somewhere else in the thread with homomorophic encryption (Numberphile : [this video] ): The hash out of the machine doesn't tell who you voted for, but the sum of the hashes do tally properly. It's still unclear for me, but it's sure that there are mathematical solutions.
Even if the machines were open source you'd have to personally inspect it to make sure it's actually running what it's supposed to be running. Unless you're reading to bring an electron microscope to the polling booth it doesn't seem particularly practical. It would make more sense to check whether your vote was counted post-facto but it's hard to especially if you still want to make it difficult to figure out who voted for whom. There are a few mathematical possibilities but they don't seem particularly practical to me: [this video] So for the time being paper ballots are probably the way to go.
How does the blockchain ensure that I can both verify that my vote was counted but can't sell my vote? [this video] describes one electronic voting system that's supposed to have those important properties, even though I don't fully all the details yet.
Electronic voting system that is verifiable but not sellable
You’re still misunderstanding how it works. First of all, blockchains are a third party ledger , which is maintained by many independent nodes are the large ones are infeasible to corrupt by a nation-state. The attack could only happen at the point where you sign transactions for the smart contracts. Voters are required to use at least 2 devices, such as scanning a QR code on their laptop (which runs Chrome) with their phone (which runs Safari). The QR code contains (or points to) a vote that is cryptographically signed by one gateway. The website or app on the phone checks this QR code and displays the same result back to you, and you confirm it on eg your phone’s screen. On both gateways (call them Services A and B) you indicated your preference, and digitally signed it, not just with your own key, but there is attestation by the device’s own private key, which is derived from the vendor’s key, meaning the vendor stands behind what their device or app does. Let’s assume absolutely every signature service cannot be trusted, including all your crypto wallets, incouding Apple’s secure enclave, everything is designed to be sleeper agent to mislead you on the day of the election. They just really want to change everyone’s vote. You can still prove which services were corrupted! Let’s say that you got signature Service A and Service B to sign two different candidates during the same chain of QR code confirmations. The proof is there that at least one of the services was corrupt.
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