Anyone here into cryptosystems? Electronic voting? I would be interested in a solution to the following problems or some variants.
Consider a distributed system like the Fediverse where each server is owned by an independent party. Some servers are more trustworthy than others.
On a less trustworthy server S, someone makes a post. This post can be upvoted by people on any server. S aggregates the votes and sends only the number of votes to other servers.
The other servers can of course ask for a complete list of voters, and then verify the vote count. But this results in a lot of data exchange.
Without asking for a complete list of voters, how can other servers check if the count reported by S is correct? It would be sufficient to know that it is correct with high probability (as opposed to knowing for certain).
Unfortunately, you can only solve this by making either each vote cost money or the user’s time. Otherwise a server can always make fake accounts