From: tob@world.std.com (Tom Breton)
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 09:04:27 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Publicly Verifiable Anonymous Voting System
Message-ID: <199607282239.AA07297@world.std.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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JonWienk@ix.netcom.com writes:
>


That doesn't really do it. In fact, I'm not sure why you move in this
direction at all. No offense.

Seems to me that voter registration of some kind must be UNanonymous. I
want to have confidence that my empowered political opponents aren't
voting 10,000 times each.

It also seems to me that if the entire system is the government's
black-box, there is no anonymity. It is a trustworthy as the government
itself. At worst, if they want to know how you voted, they can sum all
votes, then sum all votes but yours, then subtract.

Seems to me that the best thing would be a system where you the voter
pick who is to handle your vote, in a sort of hierarchical tree. Each
level has the same goal as a DC net, to make it difficult to tell who
among many people communicated, and further levels confuse which group
did, and which group-of-groups did, and so forth.

Each group delivers its collected votes, publicly but unidentified, to a
group-of-groups, and watches that groups' output. Obviously you would
use multiple envelopes to prevent premature disclosure.

At each level, you need to be able to identify your own vote and check
that it is unaltered, but no-one else should be able to associate it to
you. This assumes that there is no way for anyone to see you looking for
your own ballot, which is a separate facet of the problem.

Everyone needs to be able to see that the collected votes did not exceed
the number of voters that group has.

This is pretty simple and requires a fair bit of collaboration to
defeat. But it can be partially defeated by partial collaboration and
the rest guessed from parallel voting patterns. If your entire group is
seen to vote the same way, your vote among them is obvious.


        Tom