The Coq mailing list

[Abhishek Anand <aa755 AT pm.me>]

> It doesn't seem to be an argument for formally-verified EVMs, tho, since
> in this circumstance the "goons" could just connect another machine to
> the central server.

Not necessarily. There are cryptographic remote voting schemes that are 
coercion ("goon") resistant (as long as goons don't interfere with voter 
registration) yet cryptographically verifiable by everybody, e.g. 
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/projects/civitas/papers/clarkson_civitas.pdf (I am 
not a crypto expert and I hope I did not mischaracterize the work of crypto 
voting geniuses)

Andrew Appel has some criticisms about similar systems 
(https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2018/11/05/end-to-end-verifiable-elections/), 
which I mostly agreed with just 2-3 years ago.
But with what happened to the US in the last few years (1. proliferation of 
mail-in voting 2. extreme polarization and isolation: the "2" sides don't 
talk to each other and consider the other side as completely evil and/or 
uninformed and each side thinks the world will end if the other side wins), I 
don't anymore trust the people involved in the election process, e.g. mail 
delivery people carrying mail-in ballots, to steadfastly adhere to the 
electoral specs and not succumb to the "ends justify the means" attitude. 
Now, IMO, a system that ensures that at least the votes of the tech-literate 
people were properly accounted for would be better than the status quo. I 
don't think tech-illiterate are unworthy of voting and I wish there was a 
better solution other than the daunting challenge of educating them on crypto 
fundamentals.

I think such crypto voting schemes should be implemented and verified. Even 
if they cannot be used for voting on governments, they have many other 
applications. One application close to my heart is to reduce the chances of 
dishonesty in clinical trials, especially those conducted by pharmaceutical 
companies. Clinical trials are in many ways isomorphic to voting in that the 
objective is to produce a correct tally: you have 2 groups (experiment and 
control/placebo) and the main outcome is the tallies (totals) of various 
outcomes (e.g. deaths/heart-attacks/infections) in both groups. If heart 
attacks are much lower in the experiment group and the group was randomly 
chosen, it is strong evidence or effectiveness of a pharma product. A problem 
though is that the pharma companies cannot be trusted to honestly produce the 
tallies: they produce the tallies with almost no oversight from people not 
having a financial COI with the outcome: a situation much worse than 
political voting. This is not just a theoretical concern: there are many many 
instances of fraud, e.g.:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1779871/ (Merck hid reports of 3 
heart attacks in the trial of vioxx, which was later found to cause heart 
attacks)
My suspicion lately is that the known instances of fraud are just a tip of 
the iceberg: it is very common to see pharma products perform much worse in 
the field and in trials not sponsored by the manufacturers than that in the 
manufacturer-sponsored trials.