In light of the latest US elections (may they end in peace!), I came across this Wired story, featuring our very own Dapper Dan. I found it an interesting read, both the homomorphic cryptography and the efforts to bring it to fruition.

Dan, if you're around, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and how it's coming. I remember your takedowns of other voting systems here, but this one sounds really interesting.

-jk

Interesting article. Thanks for posting it.

Sorry everybody that I didn't notice this. I haven't been a regular on this board for a while, so I never noticed this message here.

For what it's worth, there was a recent announcement that Hart InterCivic (the #3 U.S. voting system maker) is now "partnering" with Microsoft to ultimately ship something based on this code.

Meanwhile, while I was on sabbatical in 2020, working with VotingWorks, a non-profit that does both voting machines as well as election audit technologies, I build a thing called Arlo-CVR-Encryption, which encrypts ballots, posts them online (via Amazon S3), which lets those act as "commitments" to the entire pool of ballots prior to an election audit. Ask me how much fun it was getting the computation to scale out to 1000's of CPUs so it could run in a reasonable amount of time.

My latest is that I've hacked Microsoft's ElectionGuard into bite-sized chunks so it can be a three-week student project in a senior-level CS security class. I can't link to those repos, because the solution code can't be public. (Sigh.)