[E-voting] Evolution of e-Voting...

[David GLAUDE (PourEVA)]

Hello,

I was today at a cryptography presentation that was talking about 
advance in electronic voting.

To mean it is now clear that things are moving in voting technology and 
that a new ennemy is comming.

1) Paper voting
2) "Mechanical" voting
3) Computer voting
4) Math voting

Paper voting is easy to grasp by almost anybody.
"Mechanical" voting might be hard to understand, but it is easy to 
verify and make sure that the behaviour of the hardware is constent... 
testing at the begining of the election (and at the end) might be enough.

What we mostly discuss here when talking about eVoting is "Computer" 
Voting. I mean piece of software developped by software eng. Because it 
is soft, it is easy to hack and hard to proof the normal behaviour.
Most people in computer science (IT) would be able to understand the 
risk of such a way of voting.

What I saw today is the progress of "math voting". The "expert" that are 
able to understand and "proof" to us are not the IT guys, but they are 
the expert in cryptography. Those math specialist that play with 
computer to apply their theory (RSA, PKI, ...) do know and understand 
(as we do) the weakness of "computer voting". But they might believe 
that they have a mathematical solution to that problem. Of course "math 
voting" is implemented into computer and look a lot like "computer 
voting". Except that there are keys, information revealed, mathematical 
feature, ... that are there to secure the system or proof (verify) the 
result.

It will be very difficult for normal citizen and for most of those that 
see the issues with "computer voting" to have the right level to catch 
and verify that the "math voting" is having the required feature and 
that is actually done/seen on the computer and used to verify/proof is 
actually valid and meaningfull.

Are there argument that hold against this new kind of eVoting?
Can we make sure that the argument we use today will not be invalidate 
tomorow because they do not work anymore with math voting?
Do you see this as a risk too, or is it the magic solution?

David GLAUDE