E-Voting, the Case for Decentralised Systems
Résumé
Despite serious concerns about their robustness, e-voting systems have started to be adopted by some countries to support political elections. These systems essentially offer electronic solutions to support existing election paradigms. Social media though radically change the ways citizens can interact with political powers, by allowing in particular a more continuous form of participation. New possibilities permitted by digital technologies should be investigated, to extend these interactions and support new election capacities beyond legacy protocols. Two principles seem of uttermost importance to us. First, the {\it freedom of election}, that is the capacity not only to participate to an election, but to launch an election and invite people to participate to it. Second, the {\it control of election}, that is the capacity for the people to control the election process and the computation of its tally. We claim that to satisfy these two principles, decentralised protocols, with no trusted third party control, are of great help, if not necessary. E-voting systems have been adopted in various countries. Cryptographic means are used to ensure some reasonable level of confidence. Nevertheless, most protocols have been shown to be vulnerable to attacks, thus impeding their widespread adoption. We propose a radically different approach. While elections are traditionally based on a central authority, collecting the votes and computing the tally, we propose to use decentralised protocols, leaving control and tally to the voters themselves. 1 Work supported by INRIA ADT Brow2brow as well as ANR C3PO projects.
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