Additional Prospects in a Technological Age

The growth of the internet and computer science are constantly creating new and exciting possibilities for all aspects of human life. Voting in particular can potentially benefit from the development of the techniques of cryptography. This section is meant exclusively to introduce the viewer to some techniques that may lie ahead. We do not advocate any of these. In fact, we oppose anything beyond the paper-trail based system outline in Electronic Methods until much more research has been done.

What Does this Have to Do With Condorcet?

A practical implementation of CondorcetThe general term for any election method that uses ranked ballots and has, as it's first princple, the Condorcet Criterion: any candidate which beats every other candidate individually must win the election. Any Condorcet method must come along with an ambiguity resolution procedure for cases in which there is no winner by this first criterion. elections relies heavily on technology. It is possible to tabulate the results by hand, of course, but it is far more difficult than with PluralityThis is the voting system currently used for most American elections. Each voter chooses only one candidate, and the winner is the candidate with the most votes. voting, especially if certain tie breakers are used. Furthermore, if more sophisticated ambiguity resolution techniques are developed in the future, more sophisticated electronic methods become necessary. Also, if technology can make things like elections easier and more secure, or better in some other way, we should investigate this possibility.

What does Cryptography Make Possible?

Security of Information Passage on Public Channels. Cryptographic methods can use of very profound results from number theory to pass information secretly. What makes these methods viable is the particular state of computer power: computers must be powerful enough to carry out rather complicated encryption processes, but not powerful enough to realistically decrypt them. One unsettling aspect, however, is that most ciphers used for thing like internet transactions can be broken with very simple algorithms. The reason they are not? These algorithms would take on the order of thousands of years to complete, even on the faster computers. However all cryptography is based on the hope that no clever mathematician will invent an algorithm to quickly decrypt the ciphers currently used. There is no proof that no such algorithm does not exist.

Nonetheless, supposing we do hold faith in ciphers (and most people do), there are a number of compelling results. For example, WagstaffWagstaff, Samuel S. (2003). Cryptanalysis of Number Theoretic Ciphers. New York: Chapman & Hall. (mouse over for bibliographic information) outlines a cryptographic method that is at as secure as all the ciphers used on the internet today, which can create an electoral system with the following properties, in which each voter need only mail, or otherwise submit over any public channel (in complete anonymity), an encrypted vote to the government.

• Only registered voters can vote.
• No person can vote more than once
• No one can determine for whom anyone else voted.
• Every voter can make sure that his/her vote has been counted.
• No person can duplicate any other person’s vote.
• No person can change any other person’s vote undetected.

The mathematics of this method are complicated, and are beyond the scope of this site at this time. However, note how powerful this system is. It possesses all the traits any secure election should have, with potentially more security due to the elimination of handling by human voting officials, and there is no need to keep votes secret in transit, since only the government can tally the vote, and there is no way for anyone to trace it back to the voter. Furthermore, this opens up the following compelling possibility.

Could Internet Voting Become a Reality?

Certainly the algorithm that Wagstaff proposes could make internet voting very real. All voters could install the proper encryption software, and vote securely from their own home. There is a certain appeal to this idea, and it is easy enough to use mathematics to prove it’s security, but there is one rather chilling factor to consider.

Who Keeps the Keys?

There is an enormous amount of trust that becomes necessary when technology is implemented in elections. Even if all the mathematical proofs and all the election software are made public, the segment of the population that is capable of understanding the system will be very small. The rest of the population must simply trust that the mathematicians are being honest. Further, they must trust that the programmers of the software are honest, and something even more difficult: that they are competent. Programming bugs occur in any program. Usually they are only inconvenient, but in national elections, they are unacceptable. For all these reasons, we do not yet hold trust in these methods; much more research is needed before we will begin to endorse anything beyond a straightforward paper trail system.