Privacy Preserving and Trusted Voting

There is, of course, much more to creating a trustworthy democratic infrastructure, but I thought I’d introduce a few basic concepts here.

Our existing voting methods are often unfit for the 21st Century. In the UK we still receive a piece of paper with our name on it and then go along to the polling station and receive a ballot paper. Our name is then scored off a list with a pen. We next go into a booth and mark a cross, and then fold the paper up and put it into the ballot box. This box is then carried in a van to a counting office, and humans then manually count the vote (and often get different results in a recount). This process feels like it is something out of the 19th Century. I often tell the story of the time I went to vote, and couldn’t, because someone had matched my identity to my son’s identity, and placed me in another part of the city.

So what’s the problem? Well, the problem is that there are two things here. The first is human trust — making sure that the voters really do trust the election process — and digital trust — making sure that the underlying methods are secure, robust and trustworthy. I will not address the human side, but will look at how we can create trustworthy systems which can respect privacy, while being trustworthy and robust.