Thoughts around Voting

This post may be a bit more scattered than some of my other posts. Thoughts around the issue are still materializing, so we'll use this platform to help work them out. :-)

The wife and I just returned from taking our kids on a summer vacation to the beach. Because we're midwesterners, the beach, a real beach, is a serious 10+ hour drive. During the road trip, we discussed the current turmoil happening in Iran. For those not following the news, Iran decided to hold public elections for a new president on June 12th. The (then) current President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was declared the winner by the clerical leadership of Iran, causing questions on the validity of the election results. There have been public protests, riots, and killings, media censorship, pretty much the worst possible outcome for an election.

This got me thinking to election fraud that Iranians are claiming have happened, and how someone may go about trying to avoid it. An event such as an election depends on one thing and one thing only: trust. That trust breaks down because of another fundamental concept around election that people hold dear: secrecy. Some people are uncomfortable with publicly-sharing who they vote for. So, thinking about trust and secrecy, how might the principles of Information Security/Identity Management have helped to control Iran's elections?

It's hard to just focus on trust or secrecy; the two are really interrelated. Specifically, trusting the election process is on the level, that there is no corruption, is nearly impossible with secrecy. Even in the U.S., the 2000 election of George W. Bush over Al Gore was rife with scandalous talk about election-rigging and ballot-stuffing. Transparency would solidify trust. Let me explain.

Let's say we wanted to set up a re-election in Iran. We're going for a do-over to help stop the protests and uncover the true nature of the people of Iran. Here are the things we could focus on to ensure an appropriate vote:

• every eligible citizen is uniquely identified.
• every eligible citizen has a specific attribute applied to their unique identity: Ahmadinejad, Moussavi (the challenger), or Abstain.
• The votes are cast publicly.
  
• The attributes are assigned publicly
  

Let's look at each one at a time. The U.S. Government uses social security numbers to uniquely identify eligible voters. Does Iran use a similar identity system? Sure, usage of SSN and voter eligibility brings its' own unique challenges, such as ensuring deceased voters aren't having votes counted, but by and large, uniquely accounting for every eligible citizen voter is a strong starting point.

Having your vote associated with your name is a somewhat riskier proposition, especially where there might be potentially harmful repercussions around voting against the leader in power. Information Security might be able to help; using the SSN as a base, key exchange technology could protect the identity of the voter, yet still permit them to publicly-track their vote for Ahmadinejad or Moussavi. So, if my SSN is 123-45-6789, and I voted for Moussavi, my SSN gets hashed to a unique ID (say 677-5AJ27-119#29), and I am given that value, and I am the only holder of said value. My unique ID can be placed on an "election board" for my district, and we can see that 677-5AJ27-119#29 voted for Moussavi. This would ensure anonymity and transparency at the same time. If my vote were incorrectly counted, I could contact an election official to have it corrected. You might run into some individuals flip-flopping, but by and large this is as transparent as you can get while still retaining privacy.

Technology-aside, another thought we had about this while driving was, most fledgeling democracies seem to end up running into the same difficulties that Iran is running into; mainly, they have an election, the winner of the election has doubt cast upon them due to lack of trust in the government, and they are throwin into civil war. Again, trust is at the root of the issue. What if a third-party were given the power to steward/operate the election? What if the United Nations ran the election, or created a separate, independent arm to run the election? Would that help to solidify the trust in the election results if it were run by a politically-unbiased party? Could there ever be political unbias in something as political as an election for the head of a country?