We Need Online Voting

[Xithras]

19. Similar systems have been proposed in the past.

I was reading one interesting proposal last year that actually identified a way to securely vote online AND to verify later that your vote was actually counted. It proposed a two part encrypted ballot with one part being "public" and a second part being "private" using a key generated locally on your computer. Anyone in the world could compare the public hashes of your public and private encrypted votes to verify that they match (they wouldn't see the votes, just the hashes), and the government would have your original ballot key which would allow them to open and count your "public" vote, but only you would have access to actually re-open and view your "private" ballot.

If someone alters your "public" vote record and not the "private" record, the vote record would be immediately identifiable as being tampered with. If someone went further and completely replaced both of the ballots with a matching pair, your key would no longer open the file and you would know that it had been tampered with (they would have no way of knowing what your key was). Even if they found a way to crack and reuse your key, decrypting your private ballot would permit you to immediately see the recorded vote data.

You could even go further than that, if you really wanted. You could require that the vote counting system itself generate a third encrypted ballot, showing the actual vote data that it COUNTED when your ballot was tallied using the "public" ballot. That would allow you to not only verify that your ballot wasn't tampered with, but to see how your ballot data was actually applied within the counting system.

Couple that with something like you're discussing, where the ballots could be stored in multiple places and compared against each other to allow for comparisons, and you'd have a fairly tamper resistant system.