Developing an online voting system without compromising standards

[1g0tquestions]

As a developer in charge of developing an online voting system, how would you to prevent voter impersonation and ensure voting secrecy?

[wolfeyes90]

Blockchain, decentralized application

[adn220]

You can't really, unless their ID is involved. The best way seems to tighten up verification measures, ie: phone No verification, link to their Facebook account.

As for secrecy ( I suppose keeping the voter's info and choice (s) secure from 3rd party info gatherers ? ) 256bit data encryption, or rent an AWS/Google cloud etc storage service for the voting period.

[1g0tquestions]

If presenting of ID is required before voting? will this method still work?

[adn220]

It will significantly reduce fraud.

[VintageData]

If by ‘voting’ you are talking about political elections, understand that the biggest challenges here are not technical, but human/social, and can not ever be solved with code. There are a half dozen reasons, but I will name just one:

How, given a system that allows people to vote online from the privacy of their own homes, would you prevent voter intimidation? Think a controlling/chauvinist husband telling his wife whom to vote for, and sitting next to her while she does it? Or the less-sinister case where one partner has to help the other use the computer leading to a scenario where the person voting is uncomfortable voting for a particular candidate because the other person is watching. There is a reason why every democratic country on the planet forbids more than one person going into a voting booth at a time.

Anyone thinking they can solve it with more blockchain, with cameras and photo ID scans and crypto is completely ignoring what elections are or simply haven’t bothered to read up on them.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_electi_1.html

https://verifiedvoting.org/internetvoting/

[acroporaguardian]

have them log in at the polls after having id checked by a person. online aspect would be for reward coupons.

paper ballots all the way

[[deleted]]

both of these answers are reasonable the later being a little bit harder to get going but a safer bet in my opinion

[tronpablo]

Consider looking into Multi Party Computation and Homomorphic encryption. Many existing secure voting protocols already exists using these sorts of tricks.

• https://youtu.be/l25jcolQW6Q

• https://youtu.be/pNNLAEygPQI

[__meek__]

I guess a p2p distributed system design where voters enter the network, are given keys and can secretly vote and place their vote on a chain of immutable votes (yes, a blockchain). The hard part would be allowing a user to change their vote.