question.txt

In 2005, the U.S. Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the 
National Academies of Science [NRC05] released its study of electronic voting. The 
report raised questions that must be addressed in any thorough debate about electronic 
voting. For example, the CSTB asked how an electronic voting process will assure 
individual privacy in voter registration and in individual votes. In addition, the study 
emphasized that the public must have confidence in the process; otherwise, the public 
will not trust the outcome.

Privacy-Preserving Technology
The critical privacy problem with voting is ensuring accountability in addition to privacy. In many approaches, for example, encrypting a vote with the public key of the 
election board, could preserve confidentiality. The difficulty is in ensuring that only 
authorized people can vote (that is, that each vote counted is the submission of one 
authorized voter), and that an authorized person can vote only once. These last characteristics could similarly be handled easily, if only we did not need to ensure privacy of 
an individual’s choices. Anything that associates a countable vote with a specific named 
individual destroys the voter’s privacy.