E-voting meeting debrief

[oliverbarnes]

These are my notes from the Decidim community meeting presenting their new e-voting functionality:

(The meeting was in Spanish, I guess because some of the attendants struggle with English. Hopefully there will be subtitles at some point. Meanwhile, it's possible to get auto-generated subtitles on the youtube video)

• E-voting functionality is split between an elections module and a bulletin-board API, which together enable encrypted and verifiable voting, and auditable results, on Decidim.

• The bulletin-board API wraps around Microsoft's open source ElectionGuard, which applies homomorphic encryption to votes, and calculates tallies.

• Voters are able to verify their own votes, and election officials are able to audit the voting results through key fragments that they hold.

• One scenario described involved voting booths with Decidim in kiosk mode (simple interface with no navigation, just showing the voting actions). Voter would also receive a 2fA code on their phone. There seemed to be mention of other scenarios (voting from home?), but these weren't elaborated upon.

• Cryptographic math professors approved of the security scheme. But there were no applied cryptography specialists in the meeting.

• Everybody agrees securing internet voting is a challenge, and that a lot can happen outside of the cryptographic scheme and the system itself (in surrounding systems, voting booths, voters' computers). Bugs and hacks are way more scalable than in analogic voting.

• Educating voters and getting adoption might be the hardest part. The approach to tackle this will be a mix of informative communications and low-risk pilots.

• Estonia is the major reference in using e-voting in national elections. There are other experiences in lower-risk settings, like universities (this is from comments)

• E-voting in binding elections is not yet legal in Spain

• Vocdoni vs Decidim evoting: vocdoni anonymizes the census (voters), while Decidim anonymizes votes. Vocdoni rep questioned whether homomorphic encryption is flexible enough for different kinds of voting, like quadratic voting. But didn't elaborate. Codegram presenter confirmed this later in the meeting comments.

• Vocdoni team will be in touch with Decidim team to advise / find ways to collaborate