Earlier today, @Alex_ZF hosted an AMA with @dsernst, founder and CEO of Secure Internet Voting (SIV.org), to discuss the future of digital democracy and secure online voting for ZCAP. The call explored how SIV’s open-source platform could meet our community’s growing needs for transparency, privacy, and verifiability.
Watch the full recording here.
Discussion Highlights
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Mission and inspiration behind SIV: SIV was founded to enable safe digital democracy by using modern technology to put the fundamental right to vote in citizens’ pockets, while maintaining rigorous security and privacy standards.
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Technical challenges: Top hurdles include secure voter identification, malware prevention on voting devices, and defending against bribery or vote-selling. SIV uses advanced cryptography to balance authentication, privacy, and verifiability.
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Transparency vs. privacy: SIV separates voter identity (known only to administrators) from the content of votes (kept private through encrypted mixnets and anonymization), giving voters confidence in both auditability and confidentiality.
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Applying SIV to ZCAP polls: SIV offers streamlined processes for administrators and supports advanced voting methods, such as participatory budgeting and pairwise rankings, while enhancing privacy and integrity for ZCAP’s decentralized polls.
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Ensuring transparency and integrity: SIV enables each voter to verify that their individual vote was counted, supports post-election audits, and allows result verification at any time—unlike most paper voting systems.
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Unique features for ZCAP: The platform offers cryptographic verifiability, delegation options, and anti-censorship safeguards that align closely with Zcash’s values on privacy and auditability.
Get Involved
The synergy between SIV and ZCAP opens up new possibilities for secure, decentralized voting. Please share your questions, ideas, and suggestions in this thread to help guide the next chapter of ZCAP voting.