Azerbaijan Election Results Released Before Voting Had Even Started 266
Jah-Wren Ryel writes "Florida's hanging chads ain't going nothing on Azerbaijan. Fully a day before the polls were to open, election results were accidentally released via an official smartphone app, confirming what everybody already knew — the election was rigged from the beginning. The official story is that the app's developer had mistakenly sent out the 2008 election results as part of a test. But that's a bit flimsy, given that the released totals show the candidates from this week, not from 2008."
Cryptographically signed elections? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there a reason why developed countries haven't let users vote with a public/private key pair, and signing your own votes, in a method that can be cryptographically checked and counted by any reasearcher?
This can even be done anonymously, just identify voters from anonymously issued keys...
Certainly problems like this would go away
Re:Cryptographically signed elections? (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems like as long as there's anonymity, it's going to be possible to rig it.
Testing perhaps? (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe the app developers are testing this year's app with old data? It should be easy enough to tell if the dataset used is from a previous election.
Re:The new expendables (Score:5, Interesting)
That it was done by a developer, I have no doubt. Absolutely an accident. Like putting an assignment in a conditional.
Re:Cryptographically signed elections? (Score:5, Interesting)
... you still need to devise a system by which an eligible voter can obtain (without some absurd hassle) one and only one anonymous key, without it being covertly linked back to them, or them being able to sign up for ten, ...
It doesn't solve all the problems, but blinded signatures [wikipedia.org] can take care of this part. The essence of it is that a server can sign a "blinded" token such that, given the unblinded version at a later time, it can tell that it generated the signature but can't trace it back to the blinded version which was signed.
In this scenario, the voter would present their credentials and be issued a single blinded token. The server would then add them to a list so that they can't come back and ask for additional tokens later. To vote, they present the unblinded token along with their choices. The server knows that they're authorized to vote, but not who they are. The token is added to another list to make sure it can't be reused.
Obviously you'd need to take precautions (like using Tor) to avoid leaking any personally identifiable information to the server along with the ballot and unblinded token.
Re:Cryptographically signed elections? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cryptographically signed elections? (Score:4, Interesting)
Only a handful of mathematicians would trust that.
Paper ballots with independents actually conducting the election taking ballots and counting them, etc, with overseers from all political parties welcome to watch the entire proceedings, from start to finish.
Simple and transparent.
No, even the mathematicians wouldn't trust it. See Bruce Schneier's 2006 essay [schneier.com] that explains why.
Use paper ballots. Period.
However, crypto can still add value - it can go a long way towards preventing fraud and errors even in a paper ballot election. Scantegrity [scantegrity.org] is an open-source system, invented by Rivest [wikipedia.org] (the "R" in RSA [wikipedia.org]), Chaum [wikipedia.org], and other researchers, that helps secure a paper ballot election by supplying each voter with a simple verification code that can be written down. The codes in no way compromise the anonymity of the voters, and cannot be used to determine what vote was cast. But they can be used by individual voters to verify that their votes have been counted correctly, and by election officials to verify that ballots have not been tampered with and that the results have been tallied correctly. The overhead cost of the system is low.
Scantegrity has been used successfully in two real elections - municipal elections in the Takoma Park, Maryland in the U.S. But so far it doesn't seem to be catching on very much. I guess it doesn't quite suit the needs of the big money electronic voting industry.
Irony (Score:3, Interesting)