.11.24] The International Association of Cryptologic Research -- the academic
cryptography association that's been putting conferences like Crypto (back when
"crypto" meant "cryptography" and Eurocrypt since the 1980s -- had to nullify
an online election when trustee Moti Yung lost his decryption key.

For this election and in accordance with the bylaws of the IACR, the three
members of the IACR 2025 Election Committee acted as independent trustees, each
holding a portion of the cryptographic key material required to jointly decrypt
the results. This aspect of Helios' design ensures that no two trustees could
collude to determine the outcome of an election or the contents of individual
votes on their own: all trustees must provide their decryption shares.

Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private
key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their
decryption share. As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption
process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final
outcome of this election.

The group will redo the election, but this time setting a 2-of-3 threshold
scheme for decrypting the results, instead of requiring all three

News articles.

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Four Ways AI Is Being Used to Strengthen Democracies Worldwide

[2025.11.25] Democracy is colliding with the technologies of artificial
intelligence. Judging from the audience reaction at the recent World Forum on
Democracy in Strasbourg, the general expectation is that democracy will be the
worse for it. We have another narrative. Yes, there are risks to democracy from
AI, but there are also opportunities.

We have just published the book Rewiring Democracy: How AI will Transform
Politics, Government, and Citizenship. In it, we take a clear-eyed view of how
AI is undermining confidence in our information ecosystem, how the use of biased
AI can harm constituents of democracies and how elected officials with
authoritarian tendencies can use it to consolidate power. But we also give
positive examples of how AI is transforming democratic governance and politics
for the better.

Here are four such stories unfolding right now around the world, showing how AI
is being used by some to make democracy better, stronger, and more responsive to
people.

Japan

Last year, then 33-year-old engineer Takahiro Anno was a fringe candidate for
governor of Tokyo. Running as an independent candidate, he ended up coming in
fifth in a crowded field of 56, largely thanks to the unprecedented use of an
authorized AI avatar. That avatar answered 8,600 questions from voters on a
17-day continuous YouTube livestream and garnered the attention of campaign
innovators worldwide.

Two months ago, Anno-san was elected to Japan's upper legislative chamber, again
leveraging the power of AI to engage constituents -- this time answering more
than 20,000 questions. His new party, Team Mirai, is also an AI-enabled civic
technology shop, producing software aimed at making governance better and more
participatory. The party is leveraging its share of Japan's public funding for
political parties to build the Mirai Assembly app, enabling constituents to
express opinions on and ask questions about bills in the legislature, and to
organize those expressions using AI. The party promises that its members will
direct their questioning in committee hearings based on public input.

Brazil

Brazil is notoriously litigious, with even more lawyers per capita than the US.
The courts are chronically overwhelmed with cases and the resultant backlog
costs the government billions to process. Estimates are that the Brazilian
federal government spends about 1.6% of GDP per year operating the courts and
another 2.5% to 3% of GDP issuing court-ordered payments from lawsuits the
government has lost.

Since at least 2019, the Brazilian government has aggressively adopted AI to
automate procedures throughout its judiciary. AI is not making judicial
decisions, but aiding in distributing caseloads, performing legal research,
transcribing hearings, identifying duplicative filings, preparing initial orders
for signature and clustering similar cases for joint consideration: all things
to make the judiciary system work more efficiently. And the results are
significant; Brazil's federal supreme court backlog, for example, dropped in
2025 to its lowest levels in 33 years.

While it seems clear that the courts are realizing efficiency benefits from
leveraging AI, there is a postscript to the courts' AI implementation project
over the past five-plus years: the litigators are using these tools, too.
Lawyers are using AI assistance to file cases in Brazilian courts at an
unprecedented rate, with new cases growing by nearly 40% in volume over the past
five years.

It's not necessarily a bad thing for Brazilian litigators to regain the upper
hand in this arms race. It has been argued that litigation, particularly against
the government, is a vital form of civic participation, essential to the
self-governance function of democracy. Other democracies' court systems should
study and learn from Brazil's experience and seek to use technology to maximize
the bandwidth and liquidity of the courts to process litigation.

Germany

Now, we move to Europe and innovations in informing voters. Since 2002, the
German Federal Agency for Civic Education has operated a non-partisan voting
guide called Wahl-o-Mat. Officials convene an editorial team of 24 young voters
(under 26 and selected for diversity) with experts from science and education to
develop a slate of 80 questions. The questions are put to all registered German
political parties. The responses are narrowed down to 38 key topics and then
published online in a quiz format that voters can use to identify the party
whose platform they most identify with.

In the past two years, outside groups have been innovating alternatives to the
official Wahl-o-Mat guide that leverage AI. First came Wahlweise, a product of
the German AI company AIUI. Second, students at the Technical University of
Munich deployed an interactive AI system called Wahl.chat. This tool was used by
more than 150,000 people within the first four months. In both cases, instead of
having to read static webpages about the positions of various political parties,
citizens can engage in an interactive conversation with an AI system to more
easily get the same information contextualized to their individual interests and
questions.

However, German researchers studying the reliability of such AI tools ahead of
the 2025 German federal election raised significant concerns about bias and
"hallucinations" -- AI tools making up false information. Acknowledging the
potential of the technology to increase voter informedness and party
transparency, the researchers recommended adopting scientific evaluations
comparable to those used in the Agency for Civic Education's official tool to
improve and institutionalize the technology.

United States

Finally, the US -- in particular, California, home to CalMatters, a non-profit,
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