Page 135 - Towards Trustworthy Elections New Directions in Electronic Voting by Ed Gerck (auth.), David Chaum, Markus Jakobsson, Ronald L. Rivest, Peter Y. A. Ryan, Josh Benaloh, Miroslaw Kutylowski, Ben Adida ( (z-lib.org (1)

the context of real democracies, from the fact that at least three potentially conflict-
ing interests are at stake in elections: the interest of voters who believe in, or desire,
democracy through fair and clean elections, and the interests of at least two compet-
ing candidacies. Electronic Elections: A Balancing Act 127
To understand how real life conditions make those two requirements inconsistent,
one needs to note that election integrity can only be guaranteed if voters are also pro-
tected against manipulations of internal origin, which is to say, if operatives of the
electoral process who may stealthily favor such tampering are to be, for that purpose,
unprotected. This means that the first sense of security cited above, a legitimate sense
from a perspective we believe to align with the spirit of democracy, can only be effec-
tive if coupled with the suppression of the second, an illegitimate sense from this per-
spective.
On the other hand, attempts to have a voting system fulfill both requirements (vote
secrecy and electronic dematerialization) at once, while formally aiming to achieve
that first sense of security, may – or will, as we'll argue – yield the practical effect of
reaching out for the second. This would turn the risk profile of such systems unstable.
Thus, one may begin to understand how technical discussions which bypass the need
to extricate these two senses of security will likely degenerate.
A debate that fails to extricate these two senses of security will cloud the possible
tracks through system design choices along which risk estimates can be reasonably
expected to remain constant. This problem is aggravated when, from a position of
authority further empowered by a choice for vote dematerialization, electoral officials
in favor of fully electronic systems willfully ignore this analytical imperative, at the
guise of specious, faulty or bogus arguments, mostly non-technical.
This analytical imperative stems from the fact that processes with more than two
potentially conflicting interests at play (as with any electoral process) pose risks of a
kind known as collusion. These risks have in common the fact that they vary when
security is sensed from the perspective of different interests. A typical collusion re-
quires two or more parties, engaged in the process, to disingenuously act as if their
interests diverge, in order to reach a disguised benefit to some interest they stealthily
share, at the expense of some illegitimate harm to a third interest.
In electoral processes, collusion can happen through secret alliances, in which un-
compromising conflicts of interests (or independence of actions) are faked. Or they
can happen the other way around. In short, electoral processes exist under the sys-
temic, intrinsic risk of collusions, either by fake conflict or by fake cohesion of inter-
ests or actions, aimed at harming other interests in order to improve the colluders'
chances for later sharing power, more power or its bounty.
Therefore, to blur paths where risks can conflate as they spread, making them ap-
pear as diluted, is not conductive to good policy or sound analysis, as the current
global economic crisis, stemmed from financial innovation in free markets, is now
showing.

4 Balancing Risks

Vote dematerialization enrich the ways through which risks of collusion can com-
pound and materialize, by offering colluders new means to hide their methods, if