International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Securing elections is hard: there are challenging technical problems, and even more challenging social and political ones. Real mathematical evidence may not be accepted by everyone, while complete nonsense might seem convincing to many. So what can cryptographers do for democracy? We have good designs for privacy-preserving, receipt-free and verifiable election systems. It's exciting to see them getting deployed in practice in polling-place settings where we have a reasonable chance of preserving the secret ballot and guiding voters through verification. But there is still plenty of work to be done. How do these solutions connect with statistical notions of confidence and testing? How do we help the public distinguish between genuine and fake notions of cryptographic verification? Is threshold-trust the best we can do for the secret ballot? How much work can we ask voters to do? Can we meaningfully connect cryptographic evidence with the easy verification of paper ballots? And is there anything at all we can do for remote voting?