[kwlug-disc] Say No To Electronic Voting ...

[Mikalai Birukou]

>>> The tension is between having either an end-to-end verification or 
>>> coercion
>>> resistance. Can have either one, but not both.
>> Something tells me that with the zero-knowledge systems and recent
>> inventions like zerocash and zerocoin, this statement is not actually
>> true anymore.
>
> Verification in election means that voter can verify that vote is 
> correctly recorded. Voting system becomes an oracle that answers some 
> question, and depending, on the answer you can tell that vote is 
> correctly recorded.
>
> Let's combine human coercion setting with oracle:
>
> 1) Coercer has access to voter's voting material, ids, keys, etc.
>
> 2) Coercer uses voting material together with expected, coerced vote 
> values to form a request to an oracle.
>
> 3) Coercer checks oracle's reply. Reply indicates if voter put 
> expected vote, or not. Thus, coercer checks if victim did "the right 
> thing", closing coercion loop of information, i.e. verification by an 
> attacker.

Let's wear a game theory hat for a moment. We have to identify what 
actors we have in a setting at hand.

Usually we think about voters and voting/counting system. But, with an 
addition of coercion, we now have two types of voters. We don't know 
which voter is of which type, coerced or not. And we do know that 
coerced voter will screw verification. This twist is even funnier, with 
end-to-end verification coerced voter is forced to vote badly (pre-count 
mangling of expression), while without verification same voter can 
express true desires.

Thus, we talk about tension between end-to-end verification or coercion 
resistance.