Numberphile
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8:34 · 198K views · Nov 7, 2016
Numberphile interviews cryptographer Ron Rivest about end-to-end verifiable voting. He explains how homomorphic encryption and receipts let a voter confirm their ballot was counted without being able to prove how they voted to anyone else.
HN commenters point to it in election-security threads as an accessible explainer of how a vote can be verifiable but not sellable.
10 comments from Hacker News
> I've seen many proposed implementations but they all fail because if I can prove my vote to myself in any way, someone else can make me prove it to them either to buy or coerce my ballot. There is a way to prove that your vote was counted without being able to prove what you voted for by using homomorphic encryption. So, if someone wanted to coerce you or pay you for voting at all for whomever you want, they could do it, but that's fine. Microsoft is actually working with Galois on a system operating on this principle[1], and here's a good video explaining the basic concepts of how it works[2]. [1] [LINK] [2] this video
Right - the way you verify that is by asking for 100 sealed Alice envelopes, and opening 99 of them at random. If the machine was trying to trick you, you have a strong chance of catching it. You still walk out with a sealed envelope, and the would-be vote-buyer can't be sure it isn't a Bob envelope. This Numberphile video explains the process a bit more: this video
I find Rivest's video( this video ) on homomorphic encryption as voting mechanism quite interesting. It looks more secure than pen and paper. All user get a receipt which they can verify is same during vote counting. They themselves can vote count using all others receipt. At the same time, they can't sell their vote as it's encrypted.
Andrew Appel (CS Prof. at Princeton) also gave a very good talk earlier this year about the problems of electronic voting systems. [LINK] edit: Also, Ron Rivest was recently on Numberphile, where he talked about using homomorphic encryption to enable end-to-end verifiable voting. this video
The mechanism for voter verification is based on homomorphic encryption. Numberphile made a video on this topic recently, with a few basic explainers: this video