US Election Assistance Commission - Voluntary Voting System Guidelines Vote
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Name :   Warren Smith
Organization :   N/A
Post Date :   9/30/2005

General Comments
Comment :  CRYPTOGRAPHIC PROTOCOLS:  
One of the hopes for the future of voting is to employ "cryptographic  
protocols" which  
enable certain mathematical guarantees about vote privacy and election  
correctness to be made.  
These schemes are based on "zero knowledge proof & verification  
protocols."  
They offer the potential for an immense increase in election validity and  
fraud prevention  
far above that ever previously achieved. The guidelines leave the entire  
subject unaddressed.  
I suggest formulating at least a definition of what such a crypto-secure  
voting system IS,  
and then offering to allow more powerful computers in voting machines  
satisfying that definition.  

The definition should involve votes being  
*private: a voter who wishes to keep his vote anonymous and secret  
should be able to do so  
(with mathematical certainty under cryptographic assumptions). Note:  
this means  
secret even from the machine which itself receives that vote (it  
receives it only  
in encrypted form).  

*valid: zero-knowledge proofs must be produced that the vote is valid  

*zero-knowledge proofs must be output by the voting system that only  
pre-registered voters voted and  
no double votes were used  

*the correct election result must be produced, with zero-knowledge proof  
of correctness