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

[Juho]

On Oct 15, 2006, at 7:02 , Dave Ketchum wrote:

> Note that many voters will vote the same as for Plurality, for  
> which a special form might be possible.

Yes, there is space for optimisation. Storing plurality style votes  
as they are should not be a big problem (for privacy in most cases).  
In situations where there are many candidates (e.g. 100) voters  
probably typically name only few of their top preferences. Let's say  
that the voter votes A>B>C. One could first break this vote in three  
separate votes: A, B and C. But this is not exactly the same as the  
original vote, so one needs to fix the preferences between A, B and  
C. That would lead to additional [A>B], [A>C] and [B>C] ballots  
(where brackets mean that these ballots refer to only one pairwise  
comparison). This type of vote splitting saves a lot in the number of  
ballots if number of candidates is low and number of candidate  
entries is low in each vote. Privacy is still quite good. Voters will  
have it more difficult to check that their vote is recorded as  
intended (if they are supposed to check the paper ballots). Maybe  
sufficient number of voters are able to make the required checks to  
keep the probability of error/cheating detection high.

> I would DEMAND that the record being prepared for hard disk have  
> the ballots in true random order (sometimes those needing a random  
> sequence of numbers use a formula that would give the same results  
> tomorrow as it did today),
>      Thinking, without studying, could the space used for  
> accumulating data for records for this hard disk be such that no  
> data would be lost even with expectable power failures?

I think all this is doable with open source but of course requires  
more work than ordinary software development.

Some remaining threats/problems:
- open source and known platform also makes it possible to develop  
alternative code that could be somehow smuggled in to the voting  
machine (and the code could delete itself / return to the original  
code after the election)
- we may need solutions also for the case where only very few voters  
have voted with the machine ad we therefore need to merge those votes  
with some other lots of votes to guarantee privacy

Juho Laatu

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