Claudius Li <aprentic@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > This book has a whole section on electronic voting. In it, > Mr. Schneier lists several thing which we expect a voting system to > provide; anonymity, accountability, verifiability, and others. He > also points out that there is a theoretical limit to the level to > which all of these can be satisfied. That is, we can never guarantee > all of them with 100% confidence. This limit seems to extended to > all voting systems whether they are electronic, paper based, > clay-shards-in-an-amphora, or raised hands. . . . > So my question is, given that this seems to be a solved problem why > is there so much debate on finding the solution? Surely I am missing > something obvious. First, such methods provide confidence only to those of us capable of understanding them. Second, to those of us as above, they provide confidence only to the extent that we trust the code being run (which at the least requires it to run on our own computers, and preferably is written by us; I'd trust code I wrote, even though it might have bugs; I'd trust code Bruce wrote, because I know and trust him. I'd trust, to a lesser degree, code that Bruce vetted, because I know how hard it is to examine code and how easy it is to slip something in that's very hard to find.) Paper-verified-voting is easily understood and verifiable by _anybody_. Tricky cryptographic protocols are understood by few and verifiable by a lot fewer. And, if the protocol is run on a computer I don't control using code I don't control, then I have no confidence no matter what protocol it _claims_ to use. Seth
