> Since 2018, as part of a program called Defending Democracy, Benaloh has been working on voting software that attempts to solve the problem of trust in secret-ballot elections.
No. Stop. Listen, it's possible to write secure voting software that a domain-expert software engineer understands, and a general software engineer can understand. That's not the problem.
But for voting, that is not enough. The entire voting system has to be easily understandable by everyone in society, in order for society to trust the system.
Where I'm from, all voting is done with papers and envelopes and urns and seals, and with people having eyes on the process at all times. And the most important thing to realize is that this process is infinitely parallellizable, so getting election-night preliminary results isn't hard, even though every single vote is manually counted. You just need enough people to count the votes.
No. Stop. Listen, it's possible to write secure voting software that a domain-expert software engineer understands, and a general software engineer can understand. That's not the problem.
But for voting, that is not enough. The entire voting system has to be easily understandable by everyone in society, in order for society to trust the system.
Where I'm from, all voting is done with papers and envelopes and urns and seals, and with people having eyes on the process at all times. And the most important thing to realize is that this process is infinitely parallellizable, so getting election-night preliminary results isn't hard, even though every single vote is manually counted. You just need enough people to count the votes.