[EM] Idea for a free web service for (relatively) secure online voting

[Mike Frank]

Hello, I was thinking of building a free public web service, perhaps
operated by a charitable NPO,  that would allow organizations (including
perhaps small governments) to operate online elections in a way that offers
some sophisticated modern security features.

In addition to taking standard security precautions, the site would generate
a certain form of electronic certificate, made available after the election
to each registered voter, that is basically a concise, easily-verifiable,
cryptographically-secure proof which assures that the voter's specific
ballot information (or their lack of a ballot, if they did not submit one)
was correctly figured into the official election results.  (The voter could
verify their certificate using open-source software or online services which
could be made available by any number of independent organizations.)

In such a system, if significant numbers of ballots were being
electronically altered before tallying (as Diebold has been accused of),
this kind of tampering could be easily detected by affected voters.  So it
would be much harder to get away with, would be less likely to happen, and
so the voters could hopefully have more confidence in the system as a whole.

Such a system wouldn't directly address suspicions that the voter rolls in a
given election might have been padded with unreal voters; this would require
verifying the real-world authenticity of voter identities through some
process of voter registration, but that is a problem that could be handled
separately offline (e.g. via registration in-person or by mail, like voter
registration is often done now, and/or by publishing of voter rolls for
independent verification).  For use in smaller organizations where the list
of eligible voters is common knowledge (e.g. all organization members),
padding of rolls would not be an issue anyway.

The site also wouldn't address possible voter disenfranchisement, except
possibly by making it easier for some people to vote (e.g. from home or from
work).  But online voting may also be more difficult for some people, even
if Internet terminals and volunteer assistance are provided to them at
polling places.  And of course, the site also won't address more subtle
types of electoral manipulations, such as gerrymandering.

Incidentally, the cryptographic certificates attesting to the correctness of
the ballot-tallying process might be easier to create for some election
methods than for others - for example, plurality, range, and approval voting
are all easy to handle, but with ranking-based methods it gets a little more
complicated (b/c aggregated subsets of ballots couldn't be summarized with
just a single number for each candidate).  It's still possible, but the
certificates might get a lot larger.

But in any event, the site could still allow election organizers to select
from any of a number of interesting voting methods, such as those being
discussed on this list.

Anyway, I was wondering if the folks on this list think that such a site
would be useful - or has it already been tried?  Perhaps I can improve in
some way on what's been done.

Regards,
-Mike Frank
-- 
Dr. Michael P. Frank, Ph.D. (MIT '99)
820 Hillcrest Ave., Quincy FL  32351-1618
email: michael.patrick.frank at gmail.com
cell: (850) 597-2046, fax/tel: (850) 627-6585
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