If you’ve ever wondered why, in the age of the internet, we still don’t hold our elections online, you need to spend more time with Dr. Josh Benaloh, Senior Cryptographer at Microsoft Research in Redmond. Josh knows a lot about elections, and even more about homomorphic encryption, the mathematical foundation behind the end-to-end verifiable election systems that can dramatically improve election integrity today and perhaps move us toward wide-scale online voting in the future.

Today, Dr. Benaloh gives us a brief but fascinating history of elections, explains how the trade-offs among privacy, security and verifiability make the relatively easy math of elections such a hard problem for the internet, and tells the story of how the University of Michigan fight song forced the cancellation of an internet voting pilot.