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Voting System — Notes#

Functional#

  • Eligibility check.
  • Single vote per voter.
  • Secret ballot.
  • Verifiable tally.
  • Audit trail.

Non-functional#

  • 99.99% during election window.
  • Resistance to coercion + tampering.
  • Public verifiability.

Trade-offs#

  • Online vs paper: paper still safer for high-stakes; online for low-stakes polls.
  • Privacy vs auditability: end-to-end verifiability requires careful crypto.
  • Centralization for tally vs distributed with threshold decryption.

Refs#

  • Ben Adida: Helios voting.
  • ElectionGuard (Microsoft).
  • "Securing the Vote" National Academies report.
  • ByteByteGo "Design a voting system".