Re: meeting re: defining requirements for cryptographically verifiable voting software?

[Ben Adida <ben adida net>]

Vincent Untz wrote:
> 
> Let's at least come with this:

This is a very useful start.

>  + it's not possible to know who a voter voted for (anonymisity)
>  + except for the voter, who can verify that is vote has been correctly
>    taken into account
>  + "it just works" for voters: no difficult setup for them. Web
>    interface is okay, mail interface could be okay, although it's less
>    friendly
>  + if the voter needs a token to login, the token has to be
>    'reissuable' (ie, we can invalidate the old token if it hasn't been
>    used and create a new one for the voter)
>  + the voter needs to confirm at least once his vote so that he's sure
>    he made no error
>  + ideally, nobody should be able to have an idea of the current state
>    of the votes before the voting period ends
>  + we have results ASAP
>  + the system should be able to deal with elections and referenda
> 
> I'm probably forgetting things. And I didn't assume the election was
> held in a single physical location :-)

Okay, all of the above sound fairly straight-forward for a voting system
(not trivial to implement, but certainly features one expects.)

Now, with respect to the kinds of questions that are asked in these
elections/referenda:

- do you need write-in candidates?
- do you need candidate ranking, for instant runoff?
- do you have committee elections (i.e. "pick 5 of the following 10")?

>> Second, what are you current authentication bootstraps? Does everyone
>> have an SSH key? An SSL client-side cert? A username/password?
> 
> Nothing :-) That's a big issue.

Or it could be a good thing: this means we don't need to support any
existing mechanism for authentication :)

In terms of effort made by a user, do the following seem acceptable:

1) generate an SSH keypair for the election.
2) generate a web client-side certificate for the election.

There are more options, I'm just trying to gauge what's workable for
your users.

-Ben