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To: dayglored
Electronic elections are much harder to do than most people think. Those who even bother to give it a moment's thought figure, "I use an ATM every day, how hard can this be?" The problem with that comparison, is that in a retail transaction, you have a full audit trail. You know who bought what from whom, and how much the transaction costs. All three things are documented and autditable. With voting, you have to validate the voter. (Can this person vote?) Then you have to document the transaction (the vote), in such a way that you can't tie a vote to a specific candidate to a specific voter. (if you care about the concept of a 'secret ballot' - there are issues with fraud i.e., vote buying, when you do not have secrecy of the ballot). While doing this, you need to have an auditable transaction.

If you don't care about secret ballots, it's easy. If you do, it is much more difficult to do. If you're interested in the nitty-gritty of this, do a google for "Bruce Schneier electronic voting". He's written several essays on all of this that goes into detail of the 'whys' of exactly how difficult this is to do correctly. Yeah, if you read other stuff of his, you'll see that he's a leftist (generally), but he is directly on point for this issue. I read his monthly newsletter because I respect him regardless of his politics after having read "Applied Cryptography" many years ago.

32 posted on 07/21/2019 9:06:24 PM PDT by zeugma (Power without accountability is fertilizer for tyranny.)
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To: zeugma

I’ve never understood how a person can be smart and liberal at the same time. Common sense seems to debunk all their ideas. Weird. But yeah, Schneier on crypto is awesome.


39 posted on 07/22/2019 7:54:41 AM PDT by Still Thinking (Freedom is NOT a loophole!)
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