Managing the Secret Key
August 15, 2008To date, Helios has done all of the key management for you, which is really handy when you don’t want to deal with that messiness. And in any case, while a malicious Helios could find out how you voted, it could never fake the tally, thanks to the Helios Verification Specs.
But you might not want Helios to know the secret key to your election. You might want to manage it yourself. Now you can.
However, there is really no way to tally the election if you lose your key. With great power comes great responsibility. So be careful.
Ben –
Ben Laurie suggested I use your voting system for our Information Card Election. But before I submit my membership to this, I wanted to try it myself. The tutorials were fine, I created the election, generate the key, copied the key to a notepad (Stickies in Mac OSX10.5), created 2 questions, created the voting list, emailed them, got them filled out, and verified their return with Fingerprints.
Then I tried to tally the election. I grabbed the key from the Sticky, being careful to only select the key with no leading or trailing spaces/characters, and to ensure that the full key was in fact copied correctly.
I could not get the Tally to complete. Clicking the Tally! button produced: “This page will tally the election and set the result back with the server.” Next line: 0 Tallied
I have tried this with 3 different elections, with the same results.
Any suggestions or hints?
Thanks,
= Charles Andres