the scheme does not require 56 pages or whatever to explain. there is some crypto under the bonnet that is designed to guarantee essentially the following:
1 every vote will get a unique tracker number
2 the voter is notified of his or her tracker after the votes/trackers have been posted to the Web Bulletin Board. This is to give a coerced voter the chance to identify a tracker number that points to the coercer's required vote.
3 each voter is notified of her/his tracker in a way that allows them to deny it and claim another tracker that points to the vote demanded by the coercer (which they identified in 2).
Did you know btw that in the UK your vote is not really private: there is a serial number on the ballot that is noted down against your name in the register?!
As the author of the Selene scheme and the talk i should add some clarifications:
Selene is explicitly not intended for high-stakes, binding votes to elections. It amy be suitable for some forms of election, e.g. of officials of professional bodies, student societies etc., in the way that say Helios has been used. I want to stress that I, like many, in the verifiable voting domain do not advocate internet voting for serious elections. we currently know of no scheme that provides sufficient levels of verifiability, coercion resistance and usability.
A primary goal of Selene is to make the verifiability step as simple and understandable as possible. In contrast to most existing E2E verifiable schemes voters do not have to handle encrypted ballots to perform the verification, they simply look up their vote in the clear on the WBB using their private tracker. Of course, making the verification so transparent, as opposed to the usual practice of checking the presence of an encrypted ballot, has its costs in terms of receipt-freeness and coercion resistance, but we have tried as far as possible to mitigate these.
The scheme does use some fairly sophisticated crypto but as far as possible this is all under the bonnet as far as the voter is concerned. Of course, to understand the arguments for the security claims would require at least some superficial understanding of the crypto, but my guess is that most voters will not be that interested, or will be happy to accept the evaluation of experts.
I don't believe that it takes 59 or whatever slides to explain the key features of the system:
there are constructions, transparent to the voter but verifiable by expert, interested parties to guarantee
that no two voters get the same tracker.
There is a mechanism to notify voters of their tracker after the trackers and votes have been posted in the clear.
The fact that voters learnt their tracker only after the posting of this information helps mitigate the obvious coercion strategy: ask the voter to reveal her tracker.
The notification is set up in such a way that a coercer voter can fake it to appear to reveal an alternative tracker, pouting to the coercer's vote.
verifying your vote is simple: look up your tracker and check that the vote alongside it is correct. and this is of course in any case optional, voters can just vote and go.
much of the content of the slides is just discussing the background, contrast with other E2E schemes etc.
A paper describing the scheme in detail will be available shortly. I welcome feedback.
1 every vote will get a unique tracker number
2 the voter is notified of his or her tracker after the votes/trackers have been posted to the Web Bulletin Board. This is to give a coerced voter the chance to identify a tracker number that points to the coercer's required vote.
3 each voter is notified of her/his tracker in a way that allows them to deny it and claim another tracker that points to the vote demanded by the coercer (which they identified in 2).