I often say that election security is by far the hardest technical problem I've ever encountered. Why? Four reasons:
1) Contradictory critical requirements, particularly vote secrecy vs. transparency.
2) No truly neutral trusted third parties.
3) Election do-overs are generally impossible, so the ability to merely detect problems is insufficient. You have to reliably prevent them.
4) Much of the technology than can manage the complexity of elections is inherently untrustworthy.
There are a few other problems out there that have *some* of these difficult properties, but elections seem to be almost unique in having all of them.
Add to that the high stakes and sophisticated state actors that are part of the threat model, and it can get really exciting.
@mattblaze @SwiftOnSecurity My rule of thumb metric here is "order of magnitude of the number of people trying to game the system".
Ten people? I can probably personally cope. A hundred thousand people? Find an expert. Ten million people? I need a longish 'splainer just to have proper context for understanding what the actual experts worry about.
Matt Blaze
Rob Landley