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

[Brian Olson]

Hi Mike(s),

I hadn't seen zelea.com before. It looks interesting but I'm not sure  
how to use it to actually run a vote on something.

I run
http://betterpolls.com/
which is generally designed to take votes from random people on the  
internet, but can also do registered-voters-only.
I think it's pretty straightfoward to put up a new poll on something  
and then it's automatically counted by several of this community's  
favorite methods (Condorcet with CSSD, Approval, Simple Rating  
Summation, and my 'Instant Runoff Normalized Ratings' concoction, and  
there's a handy Histogram which I'm always fascinated to look at).

It's also under development by me and suggestions, feature requests  
and bug reports are welcome.

'modern security features' like I see at banks could be done, but I  
don't know if they really make sense to be applied to voting. Super- 
openness could be done, but right now it's easier for me to just claim  
I'm a nice guy and ask for a little trust. betterpolls.com supports  
downloading anonymized raw vote data if you want to do a recount, but  
it doesn't do anything fancy to prove that everything was actually  
recorded correctly. No certificates for the voter to hang on to or  
anything. And I'm not sure there's consensus from the crypto&security  
community on what the right thing to do for net voting is anyway.  
Rivest's three-ballot might be the best thing I've seen.

On Oct 4, 2008, at 9:10 PM, Michael Allan wrote:

> Mike Frank wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Hi Mike,
>
> Here's one that allows the public at large to operate online
> elections.  (It could be used by organizations too, I suppose.)
>
>  http://zelea.com/project/votorola/home.xht
>
> Its votes are authenticated by open disclosure.  But there is scope
> for other authentication methods, such as yours.
>
> -- 
> Michael Allan
>
> Toronto, 647-436-4521
> http://zelea.com/