key: 2024-annotated-biography
type: unpublished
title: "Annotated biography: Free & fair elections"
shorttitle: Annotated biography
videotitle: Decision-making is broken
subtitle: National elections, boardrooms, crypto, unfit systems adjudicate
authors:
  - Ben Smyth
year: 2025
description: >-
  An annotated tour of my work on free and fair elections: secrecy for freedom, verifiability for
  legitimacy, score for influence. Each result set in the line of argument that produced it.
keywords: >-
  voting, secrecy, verifiability, social choice, election system, electronic voting, e-voting,
  annotated bibliography
abstract: >-
  An annotated tour of my work on free and fair elections, in the line of argument that produced it.
  Secrecy for freedom: ballot secrecy formalised as indistinguishability, a blueprint for building
  voting systems from non-malleable encryption, and the attacks on Helios that motivated it.
  Verifiability for legitimacy: definitions of individual, universal and election verifiability, and
  what they miss. Score for influence: sidestepping Arrow's impossibility. Each result is set beside
  the tutorials and technical publications that carry it.
links:
  - file: Smyth24-annotated-biography.pdf
    text: Draft