Hello, and thank you for inviting me to provide my thoughts and to answer questions on this very important and very interesting time we are in.
The solution that I have worked out, I believe, is minimal on effort required and maximal on trust. I think that with a parliament-style vote where there are only a few hundred people, it is definitely possible to be absolutely confident in the result that is shown, and here is how you do it.
I am not in favour of web-app-based solutions, video voting, or things that require a phone display, primarily because those things can be programmed to lie and display things that are not true to both sides. It's just something that is not going to be overcome any time soon. Even if the implementation is secure and safe, the fact is people who use their phones for other things are going to be continually taken advantage of in the general public, and we're going to see report after report in the general sense about phones being insecure. That will degrade the integrity of these official votes that are being done through phones, even if they're being done in a secure way. That is something that is also not going to be overcome.
What I would suggest as a solution involves a separate physical piece of hardware that is plugged in and requires no training whatsoever. I have an example of one right here. You plug it in with the regular ethernet to any member's home, whatever, and it is set with software that already exists to transmit but not receive.
The benefits of this are that an adversary would have to know the precise window of time that the vote is happening. They would have to compromise the ISP transmission. They would have to have the decryption capability already figured out and the preloaded key known in advance. They would have to be able to change or modify the packet that is sent instantaneously. That can be checked, because there are time stamps on the transmissions. You calculate how long it took for a transmission to go from a member's location to the official place of the vote being received. Through math, logic and physics, we can figure out if it was physically possible that it made it that quickly or if that transmission was unreasonably slow, which would suggest that it had been intercepted and modified, repackaged and sent. You can get an average heartbeat signal going, and as long as it arrives within that specific time frame and reasonability, you can be fairly sure of the result.
The important other factor is a secondary outside band confirmation. I would suggest that you then have the member on their telephone call a specific line to verify, validate or confirm what their vote is, so anybody trying to alter a vote or manipulate things would have to have all that previous knowledge and be able to instantaneously change something in a way that requires calculation and time. They would also have to compromise the phone carrier and impersonate the member at the exact window of voting on that confirmation call.
All of this requires zero training on the part of the voting member. It is maximally and logically verifiable, and it is minimal on cost. The technology already exists to do it.
Thank you.