[EM] Kristofer, regarding Proxy DD

[Jameson Quinn]

2011/11/30 Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at lavabit.com>
>
> Proxy democracy then implicitly values transparency at the high end over
> privacy at the low end (because it can't be otherwise, unless I'm missing
> something).


1. SODA (and other systems like it) is a different way of resolving this
contradiction. It allows both high-end transparency and low-end privacy,
but the cost is that it's just a two-level, irrevocable delegation.

2. Even if you wanted multi-level, revocable delegation which is private at
the low levels and transparent at the upper ones, there may be a way to do
it using cryptographic protocols such as those in the Helios voting
software. To start out with, I can think of a way to get the first level to
be private; and I suspect that the algorithm could be extended to at least
the bottom 2 levels of delegation. Obviously, if a single person controlled
a large number of votes, and revoked those votes, that would stand out from
the noise of other proxy changes in a way that compromised their privacy.

But essentially, that technical possibility is irrelevant, because I don't
think that the real-world implementation would ever be as secure as the
cryptographic algorithms.

Jameson

> I don't know if that will be a problem in practice, because nothing like
> proxy democracy has actually been tried, but this priority in itself might
> be enough to get some people to think twice before supporting it.
>
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20111130/ee94389b/attachment-0003.htm>