Hello, everyone!
I am currently founding a nonprofit tech startup PeaceFounder with a purpose to give equal voice to everyone anywhere and thus in the process found a peace. The technology which enables to achieve such ambition is PeaceVote protocol which I developed as part of a Twitter conversation to find the fundamental reason which makes electronic voting unsafe*. And so I came up with a protocol which satisfied all requirements - anonymity, legitimacy, uniqueness, verifiability, mobility, openness and transparency, security and lastly no bribery and coercion in the voting process. I also had email correspondence with recognizable pro-paper bailout experts who could not find a flaw. If you find one let me know it here as I could still save a lot of time if this all is nonsense
To get the right feeling of the protocol you can imagine a paper bailout except where usually person puts his vote in the envelope one puts his generated public key and instead of count, the observers publish the anonymous public key ledger. Then each citizen can sign a vote and deliver that anonymously (for example TOR) to the collection server or to a bailout box. Such a protocol satisfies all requirements** but is not practical.
Fortunately, there are other ways to establish anonymous public key ledger. The one which I propose for the PeaceFounder organization is assuming that there exists a closed group chat where one can establish a confidential communication between the members. The idea is that the maintainer can generate a private key (let’s call it a block key) and send that to all members in the waiting list at the same time. Then users only need to sign their own generated public keys with block key and send it over an anonymous channel. Either a user leaks the key or maintainer viciously adds a fake one himself users can detect that. In this way, electronic voting can be made extremely transparent.
Julia, for this project, is the obvious choice because of three reasons. First, the code used for the voting platform must be readable for as many members of the community as possible and should be easy to tinker and modify the code. Second, for absolute transparency, each user does vote counting on his device himself. That requires performance for big data processing (relative to the device). And lastly, it would be great to make a community registry to endorse those whose implementations are safe, but different.
Currently, I am alone at writing a simple prototype hosted on Github. For making a demonstration of its usability, I need something which can host a group and make a confidential messaging between the users. An obvious choice seems to be Telegram since it has open-source front-end and API. However, I still need to wrap it in one ore another way. Other issues I could work on are in https://github.com/PeaceFounder/PeaceVote.jl/issues
In the future when the PeaceVote would be a mobile application at least for Android, a requirement would be built in the software to make communities to vote once a year (or a different period) on how much they would like to donate for the PeaceFounder organization. Then the spending would be voted on by the members of the PeaceFounder organization. So the significance of contributions should correlate with the salary.
In the end, I need your help. Let me know are interested in contributing to the project send me a private message so I could add you to the PeaceFounders Telegram group. Currently, besides me, there is an experimental physicist and a political scientist. Perhaps, I can also pay something for the contributions as I do have some savings.
*: The academic consensus with professor Ron Rivest in the frontlines is that electronic voting is not safe, especially internet voting. Exceptionally clear and strong words had been made about blockchain solutions pages 103-105 in the report Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy |The National Academies Press
The thing which I think which had blocked academic minds is that one needs secrecy to have anonymity and so one concludes logical impossibility.
**: The problem is, however, that such protocol would give bribers and coercers a room to celebrate. An essential extension to the protocol is the ability to be able to make marked signatures. See peacefounder.org/PeaceVote for details.
JE