Agora Voting System for a Liquid Democracy
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15:31
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:07
We talk about agrobotnetism for a liquid democracy. Agrobotnetism, while it comes from party of the internet, the main idea of this political party is that the member of the parliament, elected for this party, will vote, the people
00:29
vote over the internet. They work as proxy representatives and for doing this you don't need to change any law.
00:41
Also the idea behind this is liquid democracy, which is just like giant democracy but with delegation because you don't have time to vote everything that happens in the parliament. So the party of the internet created this software, Agora Cidrana, which of course has
01:02
some requirements. The first one is security. Of course the voting system needs to be secure. But what does it mean? It means that the vote must be secret, that's the first thing. You need to be sure that your ballot, your vote, will be currently captured.
01:24
And also another of the requirements is that we need to support massive elections. There are 46 millions of people in Spain. And also massive elections means two things. That there are also not many people but a lot of voting, a year, 7,000 in the congress.
01:47
So the voting system needs to support this kind of thing. And of course the third thing that needs to be supported as a requirement is vote delegation. So how the voting system that we are creating, how does it work?
02:06
Well this is the voting process. First we have the trustees which are the people or the entities we trust are the secrecy of our vote. These entities could be the United Nations, Greenpeace or political parties.
02:27
So they should be of all kinds of organizations and people. So because the system guarantees that only if all of them collaborate and are corrupt
02:41
then your vote won't be secret. So it needs to be difficult to be this collaboration for corrupting the voting to happen. And then for voting we need to generate a joint key. Each of these entities, trustees, generate a public and a private key and afterwards
03:06
they publish each one, they publish the public key in the voting board. We are using Elias voting system for this. Elias is made by Benedita and his colleagues in Harvard, he is a cryptographer.
03:25
And then we have the delegates. As this voting system supports the delegation of the vote, these delegates need to publish – well the delegates could be anyone, it could be you, it could be a political party
03:42
or any person, or even an organization, and the vote must be made public before the election begins. So you know why you're going to vote if you delegate in these people. And then the voting starts and you can either delegate your vote or you can directly vote.
04:03
Your ballot, when you vote over the internet, your ballot will be encrypted by using El Gamal, which is a standard way of encrypting a vote or whatever. And then it will be signed. We used national electronic identification cards in Spain, which use standard protocols
04:27
and they are working, they are secure. It will be signed with your signature, so the vote, which is encrypted so that no one will know what you really vote, will be signed and everyone will know that that's your vote
04:42
and not everyone else. And finally, when you send your ballot that you create in your computer, even without internet, in a computer with a live CD, if you want, you send it over internet, it's authenticated using your signature and cached by the server, and of course published in
05:04
the balloting board for everyone to see. Then the voting ends and the tally begins. The trustees now start to work again and the way it works, the voting system, is that each trustee shuffles the votes and re-encrypts the ballots so that the ballots are anonymized.
05:29
No one will know that this ballot was this other ballot because it's been re-encrypted and shuffled. This is what we call a mixnet. Each of the trustees does this process, collaborating, and in the end, when we have a list of ballots
05:47
which are shuffled and re-encrypted, no one will know which is which. Then we can decrypt the ballots. This is also a work that is done by the trustees doing a decryption distribution and
06:05
of the anonymized votes. Of course, the results must be published in the balloting board, but you get the proofs of decryption, proof of the shuffle that was correctly done, and the re-encryption,
06:21
of course. So you can guarantee, even if the voting is corrupt, you know that this process worked or not, because the mathematics behind this weren't achieved. Verification is the system that we use for all these mathematically complex processes.
06:46
This software is done by cryptographers from Switzerland, and these proofs I have variability.
07:02
So even if the voting is corrupt, you will know it. Maybe your vote will be known, it will be secret because all the trustees are corrupt, but you will know that the voting is corrupt.
07:20
This is serious stuff. We have a paper painting because there are a lot of secure voting systems. People don't know this, but it's true. There are a lot of secure voting systems, but they don't provide the delegation. We are creating in this project a paper that we are going to present as soon as
07:44
possible that provides this delegation. And of course, this kind of thing is funding, but onto that, we are trying to create a foundation for liquid democracy. Of course, this voting system, when it's finished, which we are working on,
08:03
can be used anywhere. It can be used in universities and colleagues, even in companies, to vote whatever you want, actually. And the earliest voting system from Harvard that we are going to use with Verificatum has been used already in universities for voting directors in France
08:26
and I don't know what other places. The status of the project, well, we've been working in the delegation method, which is really the most difficult thing since 2009, and now we have a clear path.
08:42
We want to use Elias and Verificatum, which is the fastest software for processing the votes, and we are doing just that and also integrating the authentication in Elias for the DNA. So, well, if you are interested or want to join us, this is our web page and you
09:03
can contact me via my email. So if there are any questions or...
09:35
How is it working, the trustees?
09:45
Well, the question is how, I don't know if I understood correctly, how the trust works, actually, how...
10:10
Of course, we provide the software, they can create their own if they want because there is a protocol, but we have to provide them a software to do the shuffle and the re-encryption and the decryption, and they can use it
10:27
or they can create their own software if they don't trust it or whatever. And that's it. Yeah, yeah.
10:43
No, no, the question is that I said that the trustees have to re-encrypt the votes and shuffle them. And the question is, does this re-encryption need to decrypt the vote
11:04
to re-encrypt it? And the answer is no. The El Gamal encryption permits to re-encrypt a vote or anything, a text, without having to decrypt it. So you know that the two texts, the ciphertexts, contain the same thing inside,
11:26
but you don't know what it is. No, actually, no, you just decrypt the last one once and it is decrypted. It's a property of this encryption process.
11:43
Another question? The question is, when will this be available? Well, we don't know yet. We hope that as soon as possible. We are working there, developers.
12:03
We have about three developers at the moment. And the most difficult part was the mathematics behind this. And now we just need to take these projects, Elio's voting and verification and authentication with DNA.
12:25
And bring them together, and we're working on that. And we hope that at the end of this year, we have something. We hope that. Another question? Did I just come and ask you?
12:45
The question is, does the Palitin vote contain who has vote and who hasn't? And the answer is yes. You publish your vote. You sign your vote, so everyone will know that you vote.
13:00
They don't know what. You vote. Even you might vote as pension. It might be the vote might contain a delegation. But yes, yes. Any more questions? OK.
13:33
The question is, how can we? Well, he said that normally you want to know if the voting was done correctly or not.
13:43
How do we do that? Well, as I said, we provide. The trustees provide a proof of what they've done. So you can check with these proofs that the process they did, which of course you cannot repeat because you are not the trustee. You don't have the private key that they do.
14:01
But you can check mathematically that they did it correctly. And it's a proof, a mathematical proof. And actually, the current voting system in most countries, they don't provide any kind of proof. You just need to trust that the process was right, that there is no mathematical proof of anything.
14:23
Any more questions?
14:47
The question is that it would be most secure if we automated the trustees' process. And the answer is, well, in the end, you need a public and private keys.
15:00
And who is in charge of those keys? You need someone. So if possible, I will do that, but we need someone in charge. So the idea is that we put a lot of people in charge that are not going to collaborate to be corrupt.
15:20
So time is out, so thank you for coming.