| Cryptographer and IACR member with a tiny bit of inside knowledge here. To me, the entire matter is mostly amusing; the negative impact on IACR is pretty low. I now have to spend 10-15 minutes voting again. No big deal. It saddens me that Moti Yung is stepping down from his position as an election trustee; in my opinion, this is unwarranted. We have been using Helios voting for some time; this was bound to happen at some point. Don't forget that the IACR is not a large political body with a decent amount of staff; it's all overworked academics (in academia or corporate) administering IACR in their spare time. Many of them are likely having to review more Eurocrypt submissions than any human could reasonably manage right now. There are structural issues in cryptography, and this event might be a symptom of the structural pressure to work way more than any human should, which is pervasive not just in cryptography, but in all of science. From what I heard on the grapevine, this scenario was discussed when Helios was adopted; people wanted threshold schemes to avoid this exact scenario from the start, but from the sources I can find, Helios does not support this, or at least it does not make threshold encryption easy. The book Real-World Electronic Voting (2016)[^0] mentions threshold encryption under "Helios Variants and Related Systems", and the original Helios paper (2008)[^1] mentions it as a future direction. You don't have to tell these academics that usable security is important. Usable security is a vital and accepted aspect of academic cryptography, and pretty much everyone agrees that a system is only as secure as it is usable. The hard part is finding the resources—both financial and personnel-wise—to put this lesson into practice. Studying the security of cryptographic systems and building them are two vastly different skills. Building them is harder, and there are even fewer people doing this. [^0]: Pereira, Olivier. "Internet voting with Helios." Real-World Electronic Voting. Auerbach Publications, 2016. 293-324, https://www.realworldevoting.com/files/Chapter11.pdf [^1]: Adida, Ben. "Helios: Web-based Open-Audit Voting." USENIX security symposium. Vol. 17. 2008, https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec08/tech/full_papers/a... |