They failed to mention that any entrepreneur must also be born with the gift of flight or at least levitation.
I've never read so much bullshit in one place.
So if I wanted to change my cellphone company because a new company offered me a better deal, and I wanted (or had) to change my cellphone number because the new one is so much better and too much advertising companies had my previous one any ways. Plus I didn't want to go on my family's "family plan" because it doesn't make sense when I talk to my friends on the cellhone most of the time and with my family on Skype, it means I'm not stable? maybe not. But it means I'm smart.
Wombat is using threshold cryptography. Threshold cryptosystem, works like this (in short), in order to decrypt an encrypted message a number of parties exceeding a threshold is required to cooperate in the decryption protocol. Meaning, before the election has started a threshold is set, let's say there are 4 candidates, you can agree that 3 of the candidates is enough to decrypt the votes.
Also... Don't forget the paper backup, you can simply count those.
In the worst scenario the privacy of the system may be breached but the integrity of the system is always preserved. Let us emphasize this a bit more. Let us consider the unlikely, worst-case scenario where a hacker gets full control of both the software and all the secret keys of the system. Even in this case, the system guarantees that if the hacker tries to change the posted votes or the tallied result, then auditors would detect the attempt and reveal the forgery. Thus, if the elections pass audit and are successfully verified by voters, then voters can be assured that the election results are correct.
You verify the votes to ensure that the system is working correctly, Wombat allows voters who suspect that the machine is not work correctly to audit, but it is not necessary for voters to verify. It is sufficient that supervisors do so occasionally and that having inspectors randomly audit about 1-2% of the ballots is very reasonable.
Because supervisors are never suspect. It's not the machines people worry about, it's the people programming and tending the machines. So to catch a supervisor, you'd need 1-2% of voters to audit the machine... which I find extremely unlikely to ever occur.
you seems to be confused about the role of a supervisor. It is the supervisor that is supposed to make sure that the programmers and tenders did not do something improper.
You are correct, but I want to point out that opening the machine or software for public inspection is not the case.
Cryptography and End-to-End Verifiable Voting, give you the privilege not to trust anyone with the results, not even the designers of the system, (not because you can see the code, most people won't understand what it does anyway) and even if you don’t know anything about software you can always find a professional of your choice that would do the verification for you (simply write a program that counts the votes and verify zero-knowledge proofs. after the election is over (before it's over the key is unknown) (much alike the way people can choose their own doctors).
I'm glad you raised this question, because I'm sure most people will think that. The fact is, that the system doesn't act any different in the 2 cases (audit and real), in both cases it FIRST prints the encrypted vote (and now the voter can actually see the his vote hanging out of the machine, but he still can't touch it), and now it asks the voter if he would like to verify (audit) or not (real), if he chooses to verify, the machine will print the key to decrypt the encrypted text and then the voter can verify that what was encrypted was really what he voted for. If he chooses not to verify, it will print the cleartext (unencrypted). Notice that for the machine to "fool" the voter it needs to predict when a voter will choose to verify or not in 100% accuracy because if 1 voter finds that what was encrypted wasn't really his choice, then the whole election is a shame and can be closed ignoring all votes.
Using Wombat you can't convince someone ELSE that you voted the way he wanted you to vote, but you CAN convince yourself that your vote was counted!
Wombat also offer a verification mechanism, if the voter is unsatisfied that the system actually counts correctly. What it does is it encrypts the vote and then asks you if you want to verify that it was correct. If you do, it will print the decrypt key onto the ballot, rendering the ballot unvotable (because it can be decrypted), but you can then decrypt the encrypted text and see that it matches the plaintext. You don't even need to trust the machine itself :)
you are right, you can't(!!!) count on people to count the votes correctly. Many of those people have better things to do, and simply want to go home to their families. That's where the Wombat system excel!
