All experts I've heard from on this agree that we're decades from being able to implement such systems in a secure way, if it's possible at all. Most people trying to tell you that's not true are trying to sell you something, usually with some vague blockchain reference.

I'd recommend the various talks and papers J. Alex Halderman has given/written on this topic, especially on Estonia's e-voting system.

I also recommend Andrew Appel's talk on the mechanics of voting. In addition to the dangers inherent in any complex electronic system, he also discusses how we invented the secret paper ballot. It may look "low tech", but the secret paper ballot is several hundred years of bugfixes and security features that we would be foolish to ignore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abQCqIbBBeM

> There are many voting schemes that offer all the benefits of paper voting

A major benefit of paper voting is that you don't need a math PhD to verify for yourself the integrity of the vote process.

Do you need a math PhD to do use encrypted messaging apps? To use SSL? Clearly that's a fallacious argument. The math can be wrapped inside an easy to use shell, just like it is in your https enabled web browser.

I don't need a Math PhD to use all of those. But if I want to be audit it? Probably. I can audit paper ballots just fine, anyone can. But that easy to use shell? How do I know that it does what people claim it does? I have to trust those people. The people that have the ability to audit now hold absolute power over the result

You can make an interface that hides the complexity and lets people check their votes in a user-friendly way. There's nothing that makes it fatally complicated to use.

As I said: The problem is not using the software itself but knowing that the green checkmark (or whatever) it displays actually means the vote was correctly counted. The former is trivially done by a competent team, the latter not so much.

Just an example from another field: It is easy to compare key fingerprints shown by WhatsApp/Signal/GPG but how do I know that the software does not encrypt the text with a second key? Personally I am not competent to do so and have to trust others. Don't forget that it's not enough to audit the code itself but you would also need the check the whole build process from scratch (and processors it was done on for that matter - and while we are at it: how can I know that the display actually shows that it was asked to do?). How many people know how to do so?

Hiding the complexity is exactly the wrong approach. You want to reduce the complexity so that the average person can understand it just fine.

How do you verify that the machine actually does what it displays and/or print without hooking a hardware debugger on it?

Could you link to details of one such scheme (perhaps the one you feel is best), please?

When I've thought about e-voting it's seemed tractable except the conflict between verifiability and keeping the ballot secret. I'd be interested to see how such schemes manage this point in particular.

Read this algorithm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_secret_sharing#Exa...

It's a proof of concept, it still has drawbacks, but it proves that you can have a system where all the votes can be accounted for without any information being revealed about any individual's vote: the ballot is secret.

>"There are many voting schemes that offer all the benefits of paper voting [...]"

You appear to have one incomplete theoretical scheme?

Thanks in any case for sharing it.

Edit: just on a quick reading - if I think I'll lose a seat, and can corrupt a single authority, I can get them to return a random set of numbers for their part of the polynomial, this randomises the results, doesn't it, giving me a chance to win. As there's no verifiability, it can not be observed in the voting data?

The ballot is secret – as long as the vote counters are not colluding, nobody can observe the votes in transit, and nobody can access all votes. It seems better than most proposals I have seen but I certainly would claim that this system offers "all the benefits of paper voting". And I haven't even mentioned that voters can generate polynomials that gives them multiple votes without anyone noticing.

Like I said, it's a proof of concept that shows it is possible to have transparent auditability and secret ballots at the same time. It's not ready for implementation as it is, though, for the reasons you mentioned.

From what I understand, verifiability and transparency is something you don't really want because it enables vote selling. In a secret ballot, someone dishonest enough to sell you their vote is probably dishonest enough to vote the other way.

You can already sell votes, see this start-up: https://www.votebuddy.de/

Quite telling are their FAQ:

Is this legal?

According to German law this is illegal. Thus we're based in New York and the website is served from the US.

Just FYI, that site doesn't actually do anything. It is designed by the Peng Collective to create outrage, nothing more. The same happened during the 2000 US presidential elections with voteaction.com, a German-based site (as it's against US law) that turned out fake as well.

But of course, postal votes make vote selling possible.