Was YOUR vote counted? (feat. homomorphic encryption) - Numberphile

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. [VIDEO]

I find Rivest's video( [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.

The mechanism for voter verification is based on homomorphic encryption. Numberphile made a video on this topic recently, with a few basic explainers: [VIDEO]

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: [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] [VIDEO]

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! [VIDEO]

@jjuhl answered that question somewhere else in the thread with homomorophic encryption (Numberphile : [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: [VIDEO] So for the time being paper ballots are probably the way to go.