Right To Ask
Right To Ask
The Right To Ask project will use cryptographic techniques from end-to-end verifiable e-voting for a much simpler problem: voting on which questions are the most popular. These questions are meant to be asked in formal scenarios such as Parliamentary committee hearings and question time, or answered in written form in-app. We aim to open a channel of communication between parliamentarians and citizens so that Parliament can be more directly and immediately responsive to input from citizens.
Questions have a name attached, but upvotes and downvotes can be aggregated anonymously and proven to be properly tallied using well-known techniques from the e-voting literature.
The cryptography deliberately uses old-fashioned and easily understood techniques (additive-homomorphic encryption based on exponential ElGamal encryption).
The speaker will describe the aims of the project, some of the underlying maths, and how to become involved if you'd like to help.
With thanks to these contributors: Andrew Conway, Ishan Goyal, Chuanyuan Liu, Lillian McCann, Tim McCann, Eleanor McMurtry, Hanna Navissi, Pedro Rosas, Miguel Wood.
Further reading: https://righttoaskorg.github.io/righttoask-docs/
About the speaker
CEO, Thinking Cybersecurity
Vanessa Teague is a cryptographer living and working on Wurundjeri land in Southeastern Australia (near Melbourne). Dr Teague is interested in cryptographic protocols that support a free and democratic society and works on openly-available research and open source software for supporting democratic decision making and empowering ordinary people to make choices about their own data. In her distinguished career, Dr Teague also co-designed numerous protocols for improved election integrity in e-voting systems, and co-discovered serious weaknesses in the cryptography of deployed e-voting systems in New South Wales, Western Australia and Switzerland.
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