[HacktionLab] Fraud proof voting - will it work?

[penguin]

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Thanks for all your replies

My personal lesson from this is that I got distracted by some of the
technical aspects of the system proposed (as you can see from my
response on the blog - number 8 here
http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=16768#comments ) and completely
ignored a really fundamental part of democratic voting - it needs to
be understood and trusted by the electorate. This is despite me having
a copy of this cartoon on my desk at work - http://xkcd.com/530/

Cheers

G


On 10/12/13 13:53, clara wrote:
> 
> 
> On 12/10/2013 12:32 PM, Alan Dawson wrote:
>> On Mon, Dec 09, 2013 at 07:09:07PM +0000, penguin wrote:
>>> Hi
>>> 
>>> Through work, I've come across this thing called fraud proof 
>>> voting - it's been developed by some guy with a (seemingly) 
>>> specific focus on Africa. I wondered if any crypto-experts on 
>>> this list had any views on how fraud proof it really is.
>>> 
>>> Details here http://cd3wd.com/SEEV/fpv.htm
>> 
>> "The SMS and the envelop data files are destroyed immediately or 
>> within a fixed time period after the final result is announced 
>> (since they can be used to track the voting choice of every 
>> voter).. The data may be used to produce aggregated results down
>> to a specified level (e.g. down to population centers of 5,000
>> or 50,000) but no further – to avoid retribution by disappointed 
>> parties."
>> 
>> 
>> This seems like a flaw to me.  3 powerful actors - the voting 
>> organisation and the auditors, have access to non anonymised
>> copies of all the votes, also it hopes that those actors do not
>> conspire together to fix the result, and there is no way to
>> verify the results again later, as they are destroyed.  So
>> mathematically I don't think it  provides a secure, anonymous,
>> verifiable, system. It may be practical though
>> 
>> There are solutions to anonymous voting that are
>> cryptographically secure - like mix nets, but I think they fail
>> ekes' test of understandability. 
>> http://crypto.stanford.edu/pbc/notes/crypto/voting.xhtml
> 
> as ekes pointed out earlier: A ballot box with pieces of paper on 
> which you can mark your vote (and that can be based on words as
> well as on pictures), a continous presence of observers, and
> public counting, the possibility for a re-count: that are tools
> that can be easily understood and applied. But relying on access to
> telephones and SMS, to volunteers touring the country, data and
> papers to be destroyed: That means that the election cannot be
> controlled or observed by those people who are electing their
> representatives.
> 
> It means putting an election process into the hand of a few 
> individuals and companies with the relevant technical expertise
> and equipment - and the only thing the voter can do is _trust_
> them.
> 
> 'Trust' however is not the basis of a stable election - 
> 'accountability' and 'transparency' are.
> 
> 
> greetings clara
> 
> PS: If you want to have a simple example of trust not being
> enough: Check the videos and theories going around about whether
> the Fifa boss interfered with the drawing of the World Championship
> groups a few days ago. And there we even only talk about the
> seconds the papers disappeared from view during a live
> broadcast...
> 
> 
> 
> 

- -- 
penguin

GPG key: http://tiny.cc/gpg-key
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