Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Whether or not a person voted in a given election is already public knowledge. How does this scheme give an attacker any more information than that?

If you're willing to assume the attacker is into the voting booth, you're no worse off with this.



Because they can ask to verify.


Imagine I ask the voting machine to give me 100 sealed envelopes with "Alice" written in them and 100 sealed envelopes with "Bob" written in them. I open and destroy 199 of them, verify that Alice votes are Alice votes and Bob votes are Bob votes. I then walk out of the voting booth with a sealed Alice envelope, then deposit it into the ballot box.

That's the "verifiable" step in here.

The only way for you to know who I voted for is if you were in that booth with me.


The post states:

> The combination of the tracker – which allows individual voters to verify that their votes have been accurately recorded – and the verifier – which allows anyone to verify that the recorded votes have been accurately counted – enables full “end-to-end verification” of the correctness of election results.

I understood this to mean that I am able to use the tracker to verify that my vote was cast for a particular candidate.


Right - the way you verify that is by asking for 100 sealed Alice envelopes, and opening 99 of them at random. If the machine was trying to trick you, you have a strong chance of catching it. You still walk out with a sealed envelope, and the would-be vote-buyer can't be sure it isn't a Bob envelope.

This Numberphile video explains the process a bit more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYRTvoZ3Rho




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: