Voting and Free Software

Bernhard E. Reiter bernhard at fsfe.org
Thu Mar 26 14:33:21 UTC 2020


Hi,

Am Freitag 15 November 2019 12:24:49 schrieb Harald Welte:
> I wholeheartedly agree with any criticism of so-called electronic (in
> fact rather: software defined) voting.

meanwhile there was another LWN article:

Cryptography and elections
https://lwn.net/Articles/810465/
By Jake Edge, January 28, 2020 

covering an LCA talk by Vanessa Teague with the take-away:

"Transparent and verifiable electronic elections are technically feasible, but 
for a variety of reasons, the techniques used are not actually viable for 
running most elections—and definitely not for remote voting." 

> In fact, I find it highly problematic not only in public elections, but
> I also find it very problematic for any kind of democratic voting even
> within "private" entities.

There is a company in Germany (sorry seems to be German only)
  https://www.polyas.de/online-wahlen/sicherheit
they claim to have a Common-Criteria certification from the German
Federal Office for Information Security, number BSI-CC-PP-0037-2008

From my experience the crypto expertise by the BSI is often
fine and transparent. (Disclosure: my company has won several public tenders 
from the BSI in the last years - only doing work on Free Software). 
I've never looked into this certification.

Did some independent researchers take a look at Polyas' approaches
already?

Regards,
Bernhard

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