Benlog

Since I haven’t had the time to write up every talk, I’ll just highlight one talk today that I particularly enjoyed: Josh Benaloh’s paper on achieving both administrative and public verifiability in elections [PDF].

I’m a big fan of Josh’s work. My upcoming voting system implementation, Helios, is based on one of Josh’s earlier protocols. Not only was Josh one of the original (maybe the first?) cryptographic voting researchers, but his latest work is incredibly practical, focusing on one simple question: how do we build voter-auditable voting systems that people might actually use?

His latest paper, once again quite a few steps ahead of some random thoughts I’d been meaning to write up, describes how to use the existing receipt printer on existing optical scan machines to produce a per-voter encrypted receipt. In his words, “as soon as we have an encrypted receipt in the voter’s hand, we’ve won and we can make progress.”

He’s absolutely right. I hope we can find a way to get Josh’s latest scheme implemented.