[EM] 3ballot - revolutionary new protocol for secure secret ballot elections

[David Cary]

--- Warren Smith <wds at math.temple.edu> wrote:

> Then still, your (KPY's) attack idea is still applicable even in
> just one
> race (if there are enough candidates, e.g. 135 in the CA governor
> Schwarzenegger race)
> and Rivest includes discussion of this attack in his (latest! but
> not his original!) 
> draft, calling it the "3-pattern attack" or "specified pattern
> attack"
> where the attacker coerces the voter to vote in a specific pattern
> on his 3 ballots
> and then sees if those patterns got published on the bulletin
> board.  If not,
> punish the voter.  This attack appears to be quite devastating to
> me.

A deficiency in protecting privacy against vote buying doesn't seem
such a distinctive flaw.  Any scheme that requires collusion with the
voter, whether voluntary or coerced, seems difficult to manage on a
significant scale if there are sufficient legal and social
injunctions against it.  Besides, in an era of smaller than
palm-sized video-camera phones, even without absentee voting, I doubt
there is a voting system in existence that is immune from enough vote
verification to support vote buying or coercion

What is more important is being able to preserve the privacy of a
vote when the voter acts to keep it private.

In general, the weak link in the 3ballot system is the checker.  It
is a piece of technology that is still dependent on expert
validation, its election day performance is not subject to
independent or general public validation, and if there are any quirks
or alleged quirks in its election day performance, there may be no
audit trail, no recheck procedures, no way to recreate what the
correct checking should have been.



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