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> You solve all of these with cryptography.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this problem, and my conclusion is that cryptography alone is not the solution, for reasons like:

1. The public needs to believe it, and hypertechnical solutions are a hard sell.

2. Any blockchain approach needs to preserve the secrecy of the ballot, otherwise you get all the problems you can expect of non-secret votes (coercion, vote buying, shaming network effects).

3. You still need to have the cryptographic rubber meet the physical road _somewehere_ -- it has to, otherwise the need for vote secrecy means that the results can be entirely fictitious and pre-programmed and there is no way to check!

I.e., you can have a paperless blockchain solution IFF you abandon vote secrecy. That is a very tough to swallow pill.

On the other hand, if you accept paper ballots and manual partial audits as part of the solution, then blockchain can have a role to play. For example, the machines could display a blockchain head every 50 ballots cast, and voters take a copy of the blockchain head visible to them, then after the election the public can verify the integrity of the blockchain, and the fact that you only get running tallies every 50 ballots means you get vote secrecy.

A system that uses paper ballots and partial manual audits can be explained to the public, and the public can develop confidence in it. Blockchains can then add a good deal of confidence: the blockchain tells you that the tallies were not modified after the fact, and the partial manual audit tells you to an acceptable level of statistical confidence that the digital cast vote record contains the actual paper ballots _as marked and cast_ by voters.

A major problem is that if you are able to verify who you vote for, you can either sell your vote or be coerced (by, say, your abusive husband) to vote a specific way.

> software displays that you voted for candidate

This enables coercion of voters. It must be impossible to attribute any vote to any specific person.

How do you know no fake votes were added?

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030https://xkcd.com/2030

There is no problem that electronic voting solves that paper ballots and scanners do not, and the latter are not only more secure but are seen to be more secure. Trust is essential in a voting system and only paper ballots provide the necessary level of trust.

Who makes your ID card, generates the private key, and stores it there? Do you trust them? Did they retain a copy of the key? Did they implement security effectively (a very difficult task, considering the resources of attackers)? What about securing the manufacturing process?

In the end, you always must trust humans.

> Example A: You vote for candidate A, but software changes to candidate B and software displays that you voted for candidate A. At any later time you can check with an independent device and look at the transaction finding out that it was altered with and retract your vote / change it.

This seems to make a pretty dramatic change to the election protocol, no?

Consider example A': You vote for candidate A, but later realize that you hate candidate A. You repudiate your recorded vote for candidate A.

What should happen?

One would think they'd have the balls to put up a billion dollar bounty.

> glorious in its stupid inefficiency, because it spreads the trust

What is the goal? Having fancy crypto or people being confident about elections?

If spreading the trust is the goal what makes you say "inefficient". It is orders of magnitude better then any crypto system.

Yes, of course. See my reply to sibling comment about why a software solution is insufficient, even a soft/hardware solution is insufficient. Cryptography does not save the day. A modicum of physically auditable paper trail is required.

But updates are promised, so GP's question is valid: where are they, and since they're not there, why? Is this the final product's source code and it has not been modified since?

From that wiki:

> Private set intersection is a secure multiparty computation cryptographic technique[1] that allows two parties holding sets to compare encrypted versions of these sets in order to compute the intersection. In this scenario, neither party reveals anything to the counterparty except for the elements in the intersection.

Revealing even elements in the intersection, if that means revealing individual votes, breaks ballot secrecy.

So there is a tool that remembers who you voted for. That's great to convince your bully that you actually did what they told you.

However, how do you know you're one of the X votes displayed in the final tally ?

I've been an overseer at election booths several times. I kept a good look at the transparent ballot box, along with complete strangers. In the end, once, I may even have inadvertently recognized my envelope and bulletin during the opening and counting - because we where very very few people to choose that candidate in my polling station :D And I was lucky enough to follow the president of the polling station to the town hall where armies of public servant where doing the addition, and I checked the CSV on next Monday, etc, etc...

In theory, it's much easier to fake a number stored electronically in a computer than a large number of paper ballots.

> If you think about it for a second, the requirements of a secret ballot (meaning it's not possible to know who voted who) and the fully verifiability you are asking for are mutually exclusive.

I might be missing something obvious but I'm not quite seeing the logical inconsistency between their two goals. Note they're only asking to verify their own vote, not to verify every other person's vote. For that, isn't it enough for authorities to announce a product of large primes, letting each person verify that their own prime was in the set? At each stage, the machines only report the product of primes up the chain, not the individual ones.

It seems to me the difficulty is with the fact that we have so many places to hide malicious things with modern technology (tiny electronics, firmware, etc.), not a logical incompatibility between the goals. If you had some sort of abacus that did all this mechanically without reprogrammability... or a large computer whose logic was fully verifiable... then everyone could inspect the machine and verify that it behaves correctly prior to elections, and e.g. a camera/observers/etc. can ensure no tampering occurred with the machine until the tallies were conducted.

You can be a observer in the room when the ballot is counted. So you can monitor if everything was done as intended.

This, and the need for everyday Joe to be able to understand what is done at every step.

All the source code in the world means nothing when it comes to elections. It's the object code, down to firmwares, BMCs/MEs, even microcode that matters. It's hard to establish trust in those things.

Nope. Vote tallying is public with random overseers, in transparent boxes watched by a room of people from diverse opinions, with random inspections - precisely because we DO NOT trust the system or the people who count the vote.

Which has always been my biggest beef about digital vote. I'm all trusting the people writing voting software to do their best, actually. Being a Software engineer myself, I'm more concerned about bugs and hacks than deliberate tampering by the government. Especially in an age where AI agents can access pretty much anything ever connected to an electric plug...

In a paper election, you have a chain of people who supervise each other. Depending on where you live, you can volunteer to be part of that and see it for yourself.

In code, you have no insight into what actually happens.