Cryptographers cancel election results after losing decryption key (arstechnica.com)

Cryptography: The arcane art of turning already difficult problem spaces into the same problem space + key management.

I feel the big news here (to me) is that there is a practical privacy preserving verifiable cryptographic voting system.

You couldn't make this shit up

As if machine based voting were not a democratic nightmare if only people didn't lose their keys.

What a pile of garbage

Another way to avoid this problem is to have 4 trustees and to split the key between them using Shamir's algorithm, so that 3 trustees are enough to reconstruct the whole key.