6 ms·
We can trust digital money, but we can't trust digital votes?
by dgudkov 9y ago
We can trust digital money, but we can't trust digital votes?
- mrkrabo 9y agoWho trusts digital money?
- komali2 9y agoWho's "we?" I don't trust digital money :P
- amenghra 9y agoDoes your bank account, credit card, etc. count as digital money? Your account balance is just bits somewhere.
- mixmax 9y agocorrect. The problem with digital voting is that it needs to be anonymous who votes for what. That makes the problem much much harder.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rakoo 9y agoTo be more precise, there are 3 things that must be met for a vote to be considered acceptable, digital or not: * it must be anonymous, ie nobody but you should know you you voted for * it must keep integrity, ie nobody can change your vote * it must be verifiable by all participants Paper vote makes it easy to meet all criterions: just keep an eye on the ballot and you will be relatively sure that everything is fine. On the other hand it is impossible to have all those conditions with a digital vote, if only because digital anything isn't easily verifiable by all participants.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> criterions One criterion, three criteria.
- unvote 9y agoImplementing anonymous, distributed, publically auditable voting is quite simple. Implementing it in such a way that you can verify that your vote was counted correctly, but not be able to present it to a coercive third party to as a receipt to verify you voted for their preferred candidate, is hard.
- bobcallme 9y agoCan you trust that you won't be punished for voting the "wrong" way? Or maybe you won't get that raise that you were seeking out because you belong to the wrong party. Paper ballots keep things anonymous and make it difficult to track who voted for whom. With "digital money" it does not mater as much if people can see who exchanged monies.
- amenghra 9y agoThere are ways to build anonymous but auditable voting schemes. Same goes with money, these things called crypto currencies are digital money offering various levels of anonymity.
- pedrocr 9y ago>There are ways to build anonymous but auditable voting schemes. None that don't require printing a paper ballot so the voter can check the correct thing was done. And then taking that paper ballot and putting it in a sealed box. And once you've done that the high-tech bits are irrelevant and you're back to the cheap, safe and easy to use voting system we've been using without issue for decades or even centuries.
- amenghra 9y agoYou can totally have a blind signature based scheme that doesn't have some of the flaws which are present with paper ballots. Some of the requirements aren't met today (such as having one and only one digital identity for everyone) but it doesn't mean that paper ballots are the only solution.
- pedrocr 9y agoWith enough effort you could implement something that still requires printing a receipt but doesn't require the ballot box. The identity issue isn't even a problem in most modern democracies. But that system would be less efficient and be easier to seed discredit since normal people don't understand it. That gives you a riot or two quite quickly. That's the other properly of paper and ballot box that technologues dismiss way too easily. >90% of the population would be able to run a paper election successfully and yet would be hopeless at understanding a complex crypto scheme. That means you quickly lose a key property of elections which is that whoever lost actually accepts that result. From the previous discussion: "Electronic voting is the reverse FizzBuzz. FizzBuzz tests if you know the absolute basics about technology to implement something extremely simple. Electronic voting tests if you are able to reject the use of technology when it doesn't add any advantage and instead creates very hard to solve failure modes. Voting benefits from the use of the extremely simple ballot and box. It benefits from it not being programmable and from the counting method being something that almost all the population is able to carry out let alone understand."
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bsder 9y agoWho says we can trust digital money? The "trust" of the digital money system is because we can have humans unwind any transactions we deem to be "incorrect". Unfortunately, we can't "unwind" an electoral transaction without giving up anonymity.