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

[Paul Kislanko]

There are several ways to make ballots-counted public record without
compromising the anonymity of ballots-cast. The trick is to assign a unique
key to each POTENTIAL ballot-cast, and expose said key only to the voter who
casts an actual  ballot. 

The collecting authority publishes the list of keys that are associated with
ballots cast, and the counting authorities for the different items on the
ballot (different for local, state, federal, etc. items on the ballot)
publish the ballot keys COUNTED for each item for which they are
responsible.

The voter, who's the only person who knows the key associated with her
ballot, can verify that her ballot was collected and counted by comparing
her ballot-ID with those listed. Her identity is never known to anyone, but
if she finds her ballot-ID in the "collected" list but not in any "counted
the way I voted" list she can present the conflict to an alternate counting
authority who can challenge the count and go back to the collecting
authority to retrieve all ballots and re-count them.

A stronger version of this very simple approach requires all "collecting
authorities" to assign keys that are unique across all collecting
authorities that have common ballot items. This is also very easy to
accomplish if every collecting authority uses a common algorithm to assign
"random-looking" ballot keys that are a function of the collecting authority
and number of potential ballots for which the collecting authority is
responsible.

The "stronger" version not only allows voter-auditing of the counting of
their ballots, it allows third-party verification because the uniqueness
across all collecting authorities includes a feature that makes it possible
to cross-check the counted ballot count with each collecting authority's
collected count because the collecting authority can be identified from the
ballot-key.

There's a simple key-generator that meets all these requirements, and if
anyone is interested in helping me write it up just e-mail me off-list.