Josh Benaloh
More info
- Affiliation
- Microsoft Research
- Known for
- Verifiable elections, Benaloh cryptosystem, ElectionGuard
The cryptographer who has spent four decades on a single question: how do you prove a vote was counted correctly without revealing what it was?
Benaloh finished his PhD at Yale in 1987 with a thesis on verifiable secret-ballot elections, long before electronic voting was a political topic. His additively homomorphic cryptosystem, an extension of Goldwasser–Micali, lets encrypted ballots be summed without decrypting any individual one. In 1994 he and Dwight Tuinstra showed how to make elections receipt-free, so that no voter can prove to a vote buyer how they voted.
The Benaloh challenge lets a voter ask the machine to reveal how a ballot was encrypted and then discard it; a cheating machine never knows which ballots will be audited. At Microsoft Research he led the work behind ElectionGuard, an open SDK for end-to-end verifiable elections first used for real in Fulton, Wisconsin in 2020. His core argument is that voters should not have to trust the machine, only the maths.