Protecting democratic elections through secure, verifiable voting
I shall repeat it like a mantra: voting beeing slow inefficient is a side effect of it’s transparency. You want a voting system were a average voting helper can look at it and say: “There was nothing fishy there, I saw it”. This is because it is about <i>trust</i> and not only about secrecy and security.<p>Your electronic voting system can be mathematically perfect, but if nobody average can say from the outside that everything is going by the rules and it makes sense, then it is worthless.<p>This is why paper works so well: it takes not much skill to count it, it has to have a physical place (harder to make it vanish) and everybody can have their eyeballs glued to it, and if something fishy is going on, it is harder to hide from the average voting helper.<p>Even I as a programmer with some crypto knowledge would never be able to fully gurantee for the integrity of a voting system, because who knows what software version is running out there in the wild, and whom I have to trust on that one.<p>Paper has no software version and errors in the process can (and are) catched more easily.<p>Electronic voting is good for decision were power is not involved, or where the outcome doesn’t really matter. I’d rather improve what we have instead of replacing it with a mathematical sound blackbox that everybody can with perfectly rational reasons distrust when the vote went into the wrong direction.