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About Me

David Bismark received his PhD in Verifiable Electronic Voting from the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK in 2011 and holds MSc and BSc degrees from the same university. His research interests include poll-station and remote electronic voting and its verifiability and transparency. In the summer of 2010 he was invited to give a talk about his research at TED Global in Oxford, UK. He has acted as an expert on electronic voting and new voting technologies in election missions organised by an international organisation.

David is the founder and CEO of Swedish book publishing firm Recito Förlag AB, a game changer in the country's publishing industry. Focusing on high quality short runs for the past decade, the company and its services fit right into the modern author's toolbox. David writes and lectures about the future of the book as well as the impact of social media and the Internet on the publishing industry, the author and the reader. The company he leads has challenged business and revenue models of one of Sweden's most revered industries and of this he can feel only proud.

His hobbies are long distance running and sharing funny pictures of his cat (which, incidentally, is why they invented the Internet).

Location:
Sweden, Stockholm
Current organization:
Recito Forlag AB
Gender:
Male
I am:
Consultant, Entrepreneur, Project manager, Technologist, Writer/Editor
Languages:
Swedish, English, German
My website links:
Blog about E-voting
Universities:
University of Surrey, UK, National Defence College, Stockholm
TED conferences attended:
TEDActive 2014, TEDActive 2013, TEDGlobal 2012, TEDActive 2012, TEDGlobal 2011, TEDGlobal 2010
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More About Me

I'm passionate about

Elections - they should be verifiable. Creativity - everyone should be allowed and encouraged to create. Freedom - of information and speech, constantly under attack all around the world.

Comments

  • TEDCred score: +228.60 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

  • A reply on Talk: David Bismark: E-voting without fraud

    Mar 11 2013: Exactly! :-)

  • A reply on Talk: David Bismark: E-voting without fraud

    Mar 4 2013: Right, there are many different ways to set these ballot forms up - the one I showed in the TED talk is specifically made for the British system, but there are many others around. One interesting effect of having random order candidate lists as in the system I demo here in the talk, is that no-one is the first name on top of all the ballot forms, something that is surprisingly important in order to win votes from the undecided.

  • A reply on Talk: David Bismark: E-voting without fraud

    Mar 4 2013: Hi Kegan!

    I am afraid you have missed one crucial part and that is that these verifiable electronic voting systems absolutely do not make it possible for others to look up your vote! Even if I show you my encrypted receipt I cannot use it to prove to you, and you cannot use it to find out, how I voted. That is absolutely crucial! What I want to show in my TED talk is that you can combine two incredibly important, but seemingly contradictory, properties: verifiability and secrecy of the vote.

    Thanks for commenting!

  • A reply on Talk: David Bismark: E-voting without fraud

    Mar 4 2013: Hi Robin!

    Yeah, you are right - it is really very hard to run a democracy transparently! My work is in making one small part, the voting and vote counting process, so transparent that there can be no fraud. For example, I am suggesting that we should use machines that can't malfunction without each individual voter knowing that her vote has not been counted (I am referring to the hanging chads where lots of votes were thrown out and no way for voters to know that they had been disenfranchised.) But, as you point out, it can happen in so many other places. We have to keep fighting to make democracy stronger by being more transparent!

  • A reply on Talk: David Bismark: E-voting without fraud

    Apr 20 2012: The voting receipt DOES NOT say who you have voted for - that is the secret to making the system both verifiable AND secret! :-)

  • A reply on Talk: David Bismark: E-voting without fraud

    Apr 20 2012: Hi - sorry I only just saw this (wish you had e-mailed me and I would have helped you much faster!). That paper is very old by now so there are better ones describing PaV, go to pretavoter.com for those.

  • A reply on Talk: David Bismark: E-voting without fraud

    Apr 20 2012: The voting receipt DOES NOT say who you have voted for - that is the secret to making the system both verifiable AND secret! :-)
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    A reply on Talk: David Bismark: E-voting without fraud

    Apr 20 2012: Hi Bev (although I'm guessing you are not actually Bev Harris)

    1. Verifying your own vote is only one part in the verification chain, verifying all the votes (the pool as you call it) is also part of the chain.

    2. I am sorry, I have no idea what you mean with this analogy

    3. The point of an end-to-end verifiable system like the ones I talk about in this TED Talk is that not even the people running the server can change any votes or get away with cheating.

    4. The system I am talking about is not primarily aimed at battling the problem of voter registration - it doesn't weed out made-up names. But just because fixing the problem of voting doesn't fix the problem of voter registration doesn't mean we shouldn't do it - and we should fix the problem of voter registration too!

    5. As in 3. above, the point of an end-to-end verifiable system is to make sure that not even an administrator or a cable can cheat without getting found out!
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    A reply on Talk: David Bismark: E-voting without fraud

    Apr 20 2012: Hey Dmitry! I am guessing from your name and your disbelief in politicians that you are Russian - might that be correct?

    You are right though, there will always be those who want to cheat. And those who cheat are not going to start using one of these verifiable systems where cheating is impossible (it will always be found out). So it is up to us the people to make them use it! (By the way, the way of cheating you describe has been considered in the research field but I didn't have time to go into that much detail in my talk - thanks for bringing it up!)
  • +1

    A reply on Talk: David Bismark: E-voting without fraud

    Apr 20 2012: Thank you Mr Busby! I really loved the conversations on here and explaining more of the details that deal with most of the concerns that people have (those tend to turn up in the research community as the years pass, so we've dealt with most) but I'm afraid the conversation was rather ruined by a couple of trolls. :-(
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