Board vote code: Difference between revisions - Consumerium development wiki

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Like all [[e-voting]] mechanisms, this one is certainly open to rigging and spying at least by its own developers. There is probably no way around that.

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LOL!!! That's the funniest thing I've read in ages. You think I'm a friend and ally of Erik, and I wanted to help him win the election against Anthere??? I've made no secret of my dislike for Erik. He's arrogant and overbearing. He's done a few things to piss me off in the past and I'm still bearing a grudge. I voted for everyone ''except'' him on the contributing ballot. By contrast I have a great deal of respect for Anthere.

I had two personal reasons for making the voting system hard for developers to rig: firstly out of distrust for Erik, and secondly because I was entertaining visions of being a candidate myself. It takes a lot of care to design a voting system such that nobody could reasonably claim that even its designer could rig it.

This is made possible by displaying the encrypted election records. When someone votes, their election record both in plain text and in encrypted form is displayed to them. They may then check to make sure it appears on the dump. If it spontaenously disappears, then they can raise the alarm bells. A developer could rig it so that a different dump is displayed to the general public than to the private key holder, but the private key holder could check for this by requesting copies of the dump downloaded by other people.

Any paranoid member of the general community can check for disappearing vote records by regularly downloading the entire dump and comparing new dumps and old dumps side by side. Voting records will indeed disappear from the dump due to the election administrator striking out invalid votes, or when someone votes twice. But if such removals are challenged, they can be checked for legitimacy by a third party examining the log.

Secrecy, that is preventing anyone from discovering who voted for who, is also very important. My original idea was to preserve secrecy except from the private key holder. I later realised that simply leaving the username off the encrypted records would discourage casual snooping by the private key holder. It also makes it harder for a developer to breach secrecy by reading the temporary files input to GPG. I made no effort to prevent a determined private key holder from working out who voted for who, although this may be possible in principle.

A developer may breach secrecy in several ways, such as installing a packet sniffer, or modifying the voting code such that unencrypted votes are logged. However these methods are detectable, and difficult enough so that casual snooping is impossible. Dectability adds an element of risk for a developer wanting to breach secrecy. Note that for breaches of secrecy to be detected, there must be a vigilant non-corrupt person with root access to the servers. Wikipedia has a diverse group of developers with root access. Others wishing to use a similar voting system may not be so lucky. In such cases, it may be better to use an external company to provide the web hosting, and to allow only a trusted neutral person access to that machine, or to allow a diverse group of people access, for oversight.

-- [[User:Tim Starling|Tim Starling]] 10:44, 27 Jun 2004 (EEST)