14 ms·

Sierra Leone just ran the first blockchain-based election

542 points by grdeken 9y ago

colordrops 9y ago
This is an amazing milestone, and a stake in the heart of the idea that blockchain tech is no different than "tulip bulbs".
- lukeqsee 9y ago
  I don’t think anyone is saying blockchain tech is “tulip bulbs”. The concern is Bitcoin (an instance of blockchain tech), et al., are not all the proponents claim them to be. I’m convinced the blockchain is here to stay. Bitcoin? Not so much.
  - colordrops 9y ago
    Fair enough, but there have been a lot of disparaging words said toward blockchains as well until recently.
    - Erlangolem 9y ago
      I don’t think I’ve seen any of that, just a sense of weariness and disgust with their applications in cryptocurrency. I think that the raw excitement over blockchain tech has been damped from the initial fire, given the issues around scalability, but it still seems to enjoy a lot of respect. The problem is usually that like AI, “blockchain” just gets slapped onto a lot of dogs in an attempt to get money. I wouldn’t confuse that with rejection of the blockchain tech, just the cynical implementations that have mostly emerged.
  - Aqueous 9y ago
    actually a lot of people are saying that, mostly non-technical who have very little analogue for understanding why distributed consensus algorithms could have merit. I've been presented that analogy by several friends and my father, for instance.
  - admyral 9y ago
    In my opinion, distributed ledgers and mutable blockchains based around trusted actors are business as usual and frankly not very interesting. Bitcoin could actually make everyone's life a little better. Isn't that what technology was meant to be?
  - wpietri 9y ago
    Personally, I'm saying Bitcoin is tulip bulbs (or, in Sarah Jeong's excellent phrase, "math Beanie Babies"). The blockchain, on the other hand, I think is more like XML/XSLT: a really interesting technology that has almost no real-world use that couldn't be done more easily with some other technology. And that 15-20 years after its popularity will be similarly obscure. I've been looking for years, but, digital speculative pseudo-commodities aside, I still have not found an in-production, value-delivering use of blockchain technology that couldn't be done as well or better with some more well understood technology.
    - quickthrower2 9y ago
      XSLT is one of those things where an XSLT ninja can be super productive in transforming XML and do things much quicker than the coder using a general purpose language. But most of us don't use XSLT enough to get that good, so for most of us XSLT is harder than just coding something.
      - mikekchar 9y ago
        Kind of off topic, but just want to chip in to say that XSLT is awesome. The average programmer can learn it quite quickly. For me, the "killer application" for XSLT is screen scraping HTML. If you want to aggregate data that is spread across a whole bunch of websites, it absolutely rocks. It is especially good if your organisation uses a SaaS that doesn't give you access to an API. Even if you have an API, it is often an order of magnitude easier to do what you need to do in XSLT. Which reminds me, I've been meaning to generate burn down charts for Trello for a long time now...
        wpietri 9y ago
        I'm not denying that XSLT is a neat technology. But for those who don't know the history, the vision was that XML would be this amazing interchange technology, and XSLT would be used to transform the XML as needed between and within apps, without needing real programmers. For example, I know of one top-10 website circa 2004 that had their Java programmers producing only XML output. Then, XSLT specialists would transform that into HTML for rendering. In theory, this provided a clear separation between back-end and front-end programmers. In practice, it was a giant clusterfuck, because any real work required coordinated changes at multiple levels. Although in theory the front-end work was independent, the reality was absurdly convoluted XSLT trying to turn not-very-good XML into something that rendered well on screen. Nobody sensible does this today. At the time, XML/XSLT was expected to be central to a new, better way of making software. But now it's a weird niche thing, because although it was technologically cool, it was not actually better for 99% of use cases.
- aaron695 9y ago
  “tulip bulbs” are only a multi billion $ industry. I'm pretty sure most people consider blockchain tech to be a trillion $ industry.
- pishpash 9y ago
  Whether it's a valid PoC or otherwise, it reminds me how the US is mired in hyper-political arguments about voter fraud/Diebold machine issues when time could be spent genuinely looking for improved processes of election.
- simias 9y ago
  Call me a Luddite but I still don't see it. It's still effectively a good old database rebranded as "blockchain" to sound cool and innovative. The tools to do something like that have existed for a long time. The big issue these days is that the word "blockchain" is so broad that it's almost meaningless. I'm sure cryptocurrency advocates see this election as a win for instance, but in essence what do cryptocurrencies and this voting architecture share besides this rather nebulous concept of "blockchain"? Clearly the election is neither trustless, nor particularly decentralized. Blockchain is not "tulip bulbs" (cryptocurrencies might be). Blockchain is like "cloud computing", "web 2.0", "web scale" or "full stack". It's a fancy marketing name that doesn't mean much on its own.
bdamm 9y ago
Blockchain-based elections seemed inevitable but I never saw it coming from a national election proxy-ballot first. I thought maybe stockholders at an AGM for a blue-chip company would be the first large-scale example.
ajhurliman 9y ago
Since this was just a proof of concept, I'd love to see the blockchain results compared to the actual results.
utnick 9y ago
by 'blockchain-based' they mean, a normal election happened with traditional voting, and then some of the vote counters uploaded the tally of the votes they counted to a private blockchain
- thatf 9y ago
  any quotes?
  - QML 9y ago
    "The process, which aimed to prevent voter fraud in Sierra Leone, was powered by Agora, a blockchain voting solutions provider. The company used a permissioned blockchain to ensure that recorded data remained protected while also being transparent to the stakeholders, all of whom were given permitted access to the blockchain in order to tally the votes. During the process, initial votes that are recorded on ballot papers are to be counted by neutral observers. The procedure, being watched by Agora, is the key step to entering that data on to the blockchain." https://www.bitguru.co.uk/sierra-leone-presidential-election-powered-by-blockchain-voting/ https://www.bitguru.co.uk/sierra-leone-presidential-election...
    - fjsolwmv 9y ago
      How is block chain used, besides as a buzzword?
      - jacques_chester 9y ago
        It isn't. You'll note that they carefully failed to disabuse anyone of the notion that the entire thing took place online.
iokevins 9y ago
They used Agora: https://agora.vote/ https://agora.vote/ (Aside: forgot to turn off my extension and so it appeared as, 'Sierra Leone just ran the first "Multiple copies of a giant Excel spreadsheet"-based election') https://github.com/cynthiablee/blockchain-to-spreadsheet https://github.com/cynthiablee/blockchain-to-spreadsheet
- geofft 9y ago
  Well, it's a reasonable translation - what precisely makes this vote a "blockchain" and not just a giant Excel spreadsheet? There's no double-spend problem. There's a correct way to merge two ballots cast by the same private key: discard them both. Since all operations are mergeable in an arbitrary order, there's no need for proof-of-work or anything like that to determine which chain is the "correct" chain - any pile of ballots that contains all valid ballots is correct, and any partial pile can get the remaining ballots appended at the end. From the whitepaper it looks like they're running their own "skipchain," which they refer to as a form of blockchain, but looks to me like a cross between a Merkle tree and a skip list with no proof-of-work mechanism. (It seems like a genuinely useful / novel data structure, I just wouldn't call it a blockchain.) And they're running some sort of proof-of-work consensus to gate additions onto this skipchain, and periodically storing the state of the skipchain in the Bitcoin blockchain. I don't really understand why the latter two parts are necessary: the record of ballots should be self-authenticating, and it should be easy to tell if someone has removed a ballot, right? Is the idea that people are not likely to watch the skipchain a la CT log monitors, so they want to use Bitcoin because people already watch that? On the one hand, they appear to have real cryptographers nad real research behind this. On the other, saying "blockchain" seems like a great way for someone running an unfair election to make it appear more legitimate....
  - zepolen 9y ago
    > There's a correct way to merge two ballots cast by the same private key: discard them both What about the scenario where someone puts a gun to your head and forces you to vote for them - and you can't change your vote at a later period?
KMag 9y ago
I cautiously applaud the progress. Back in Ron Rivest's 6.857 computer security class, we spent some time on electronic voting. If you're not careful to get the privacy right, you open up more opportunities for coercion. With anonymous paper ballots, coercion can and does happen, but it basically requires physical control of the polling station / voting booth to pull off. In this case, anonymized ballots are put on a blockchain. Hopefully the system is auditable, but provides no way for someone to prove which anonymized ballot serial number belongs to them. Otherwise, the thugs can come to your house and either beat you or pay you your bribe after forcing you to reveal how you voted.
- craftyguy 9y ago
  How do you provide anonymized ballots while at the same time guaranteeing that fraudulant voting is not taking place? It seems that being able to verify that a ballot came from an actual person authorized to vote (and not some bot) is key, but I'm not sure how to satisfy both.
  - mvid 9y ago
    Perhaps with asymmetric key encryption? So someone can validate that a vote was theirs, but you can't pin a vote to a person without them doing so. It would require that everyone understood key management, which is probably untenable
    - GeneralMayhem 9y ago
      That doesn't guard against the lead pipe decryption strategy. The point is that you need a way to prove that a vote was yours, without any possible way to prove which vote was yours, whether you want to or not. I'm not a cryptography expert, but that sounds difficult if not logically impossible.
      - colordrops 9y ago
        How is lead pipe coercion currently handled?
piotrkaminski 9y ago
> thereby offering instant access to the election results. ... > it is still unclear who won
- darawk 9y ago
  Only 70% of the votes were using this system.
  - kijin 9y ago
    Even when only 70% of the votes are counted, it should be pretty clear who got more votes than another. The problem in this case is that no candidate got a majority, so the top two will need to have a run-off election.
- aptsurdist 9y ago
  I think what actually happened is that no candidate won enough votes, so a runoff is required. "The National Electoral Commission (NEC) declared a runoff after none of the 16 presidential hopefuls on the March 7 ballot paper secured the 55% needed to secure an outright victory." http://www.africanews.com/2018/03/15/sierra-leone-presidential-runoff-here-are-the-two-kingmakers/ http://www.africanews.com/2018/03/15/sierra-leone-presidenti...
tzs 9y ago
How does it compare to Scantegrity [1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity
m3kw9 9y ago
I hope people there don’t automatically imply trust everytime they hear blockchain. If controlled by central authorities the blocks can be changed like text on a file.
zabil 9y ago
Does anyone know if this decentralized with miners rewarded with coins to keep the nodes and network running?
iamgopal 9y ago
In future, anybody with sufficient support can propose any change in legal system and have it backed up directly by individuals instead of elite parliamentary class. Will that happen ? That can remove whole election criteria.
- pishpash 9y ago
  That's basically referenda and direct democracy, and I don't think it's the technology that's holding that back.
- ramblerman 9y ago
  > anybody with sufficient support can propose any change in legal system so Switzerland?
- Synaesthesia 9y ago
  There’s nothing technical preventing this today, or anytime before. What’s been lacking is the political will and the class consciousness to implement it.
AlexCoventry 9y ago
I'm glad to see they've backed away from doing an ICO token for now. That was sketchy as hell.
thatf 9y ago
Found no description of how exactly people vote with Agora https://agora.vote/ https://agora.vote/: do they come to a place and press a button or do they download an app(or go to a web page) and press a button? Either way, I can't see how fraud is prevented even with a blockchain in place.
nimrod0 9y ago
Paper describing the Agora network: https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf
John_KZ 9y ago
Blockchain provides no advantage over other technologies in elections.
mozumder 9y ago
So, this is a great way for a major states to actually brute-force hack elections: have several millions of computers do proof-of-work for false ballot data.
finchisko 9y ago
I miss details here. 1. Can it be said that the election was electronic? If so, why is the headline saying they used blockchain and not elections was first time electronic. (I consider blockchain here only as implementation detail). 2. Could voters vote from home over wire or they had to come to some kind of booth that had electronic voting device in it?
- c12 9y ago
  It can be said that the election was electronic, however other countries have used electronic polling stations (notably the USA) and those have since been proven to be easily hacked and the results modified. The headline here stating the use of blockchain is important because its the first election on the planet that has used the implementation and its an implementation that can't be modified without trace. As for point two I have no idea, I am assuming it required people using voting booths but given the technology used, nothing is stopping it from allowing decentralized voting. edit: As it turns out it looks as though people voted using traditional paper ballets and it was inputted into the block chain via a neutral third party: https://www.bitguru.co.uk/sierra-leone-presidential-election-powered-by-blockchain-voting/ https://www.bitguru.co.uk/sierra-leone-presidential-election...
dschuetz 9y ago
I don't think that decentralized voting is a good thing at all. Voting will lose its significance when a vote can be issued with barely more than just a click. Elections and votes will become increasingly meaningless and much more frequent. Social interaction suffers greatly today, because of the success of Social Media, which was praised as a new and easy way to socially interact without going outside. Blockchain might be the right choice of technology for the voting process, people still need to be obliged to go to the city hall to issue their vote, in person!
- juliendorra 9y ago
  The Swiss have very frequent votes, with direct votes on several issues 3 or 4 times a year. That’s in addition to electing representatives. Of course they are the oldest continuous modern democracy. You could argue from the Swiss example that more voting occasions wouldn’t change the main issues of modern democracies, but it doesn’t seems to lower the importance of voting either, with a similar turn out that elsewhere. (Also, a technical solution to constant voting and flexible, transferable delegation of voting power is the main goal of the fluid democracy movement.)
  - bjelkeman-again 9y ago
    The Swiss have a relatively low turnout for their voting. 47% http://www.electionguide.org/countries/id/207/ http://www.electionguide.org/countries/id/207/ It seems people only vote on what they care about. Which I think can be expected if there are many votes. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/yes-no-or-sometimes-_most-swiss-do-actually-vote/41963568 https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/yes-no-or-sometimes-_most-swiss...
- deviationblue 9y ago
  > people still need to be obliged to go to the city hall to issue their vote, in person! And you can also then police the undesirables by putting them through onerous identification processes. /sarcasm
- icelancer 9y ago
  >> Voting will lose its significance Don't worry; in the United States, it largely already has. Blockchain tech can't make it much worse. >> people still need to be obliged to go to the city hall to issue their vote, in person! Yeah, that's not ableist at all. Don't worry about those with limited transportation options. And piling tons of people into city hall will totally make people social again.... ???
braptor 9y ago
Good effort for trying, at least we have some potential even if it fails.
iafrikan 9y ago
Correction: Aroga, Swiss company, used blockchain to tally and track election results. Older thread below. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578872
Twisell 9y ago
This has really gone to far. What’s next? Some dictator will run the first blockchain-based death sentence via a distributed big data popular jury to guarantee a fair and auditable trial? PS : forgot to mention this was a cloud based, severless solution developed by a scrum agile team while pair programming in a 6th generation language for extra scalability and safety.
deleted 9y ago
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headmelted 9y ago
I've got a question I didn't see answered in the article. Is the ledger hidden until the end of the election or publicly visible throughout? I only ask as it's a subtle technical difference that could massively influence the outcome.
amitbr 9y ago
In cryptography, a ring signature is a type of digital signature that can be performed by any member of a group of users that each have keys. Therefore, a message signed with a ring signature is endorsed by someone in a particular group of people. One of the security properties of a ring signature is that it should be computationally infeasible to determine which of the group members' keys was used to produce the signature. Ring signatures are similar to group signatures but differ in two key ways: first, there is no way to revoke the anonymity of an individual signature, and second, any group of users can be used as a group without additional setup. Ring signatures were invented by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Yael Tauman, and introduced at ASIACRYPT in 2001.[1] The name, ring signature, comes from the ring-like structure of the signature algorithm. Linkable ring signatures [4] The property of linkability allows one to determine whether any two signatures have been produced by the same member (under the same private key). The identity of the signer is nevertheless preserved. One of the possible applications can be an offline e-cash system. [link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature]
- Kliment 9y ago
  Linkable ring signatures are problematic because if someone can coerce you into signing a second message then they can identify who you voted for.
mtgx 9y ago
> His chosen successor, Samura Kamara, is being challenged by 15 other candidates > Experts say a presidential run-off is likely as a first-round win would require one candidate taking 55% of the vote. When even Sierra Leone has a more democratic voting system than Freedom Land™ (and I'm not talking about blockchains).
sannee 9y ago
Migrating elections to a technology one needs mathematics/CS PhD to understand just a part of from technology that can be understood by a middle schooler doesn't seem all that great. The article talks about "fully-transparent voting solution for this future", yet I somehow don't see any transparency when it all relies on magic only a negligible part of the population understands.
- icelancer 9y ago
  Plenty of idiots use an ATM and work with the financial system and all of its quirks without much issue, why would a blockchain-based system be any different?
  - sannee 9y ago
    It's not about using the system as an "user". It's about the fact that it bases democracy on principles which are way beyond the mathematical capabilities of 99%+ of the electorate! I mean, if my government decides to use some crypto/blockhain magic, there is no way I can figure out if using hash algorithm H in a method X is valid choice or if it is a backdoor/negligence. This is an issue which simply does not happen with paper ballots (backdooring these is of course possible, but really expensive especially at scale). The attack surface is easy to reason out, unlike with cryptography. Maybe it does not matter though (and maybe I am afraid of mathematicians secretly taking over the world, ha!)
    - dwighttk 9y ago
      I think it matters
  - specialist 9y ago
    Accounting uses double entry (credits & debits), election administration does not. Compulsory voting could make election administration look more like accounting. Blockchains explicitly remove privacy, whereas voting should be the Australian Ballot, aka private voting & public counting.
  - 9y ago
beiller 9y ago
I think this is really cool. A trendy buzzword tech may bring more people to the polls, and the unforgable blockchain technology seems to have a use case here. I wonder how they prevent people from making multiple accounts. The fact that generally I find block chains slow, doesn't negatively affect this type of system. Great!
GenericsMotors 9y ago
"blockchain-based election" is a bit of a stretch. A third party recorded part of the election results using a blockchain. The election itself was still a paper ballot. Perhaps if the company had used Postgres to store the results there would have been an article called "Sierra Leone just ran the first RDBMS-based election"? Probably not, since relational DBs are not buzzword material.
meganibla 9y ago
Confirmation for the perspective that Africa is cyberpunk
juanmirocks 9y ago
I am positive about this first step. Looking forward to seeing more of this in for example (or rather specifically) Switzerland.
retox 9y ago
DO NOT ACCEPT ANY DIGITAL ONLY VOTING SYSTEM. UNLESS THERE IS A WAY TO PHYSICALLY AUDIT THE SYSTEM, AND ESPECIALLY YOUR OWN VOTE, ALL SUCH VOTES SHOULD BE CONSIDERED NULL AND VOID. DIGITAL ONLY VOTING IS A FORM OF VOTER SUPPRESSION AND CANNOT BE CONSIDERED LEGITIMATE.
- sjapkee 9y ago
  If you can't count all of the votes either phisycal or digital, you can't be sure that voting isn't compromised. So, you can never be sure.
tardo99 9y ago
Can someone explain to me how this works? Who are the miners? Where is the competition to mine blocks? How is the system distributed such that one entity can't back-propagate fabricated blocks into the chain?
- Joool 9y ago
  In their whitepaper [1] they mention storing cryptographic proofs on the Bitcoin blockchain (Section 3). However they do not seem to specify what proofs exactly. [1] https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf
bogomipz 9y ago
Can anyone comment on specifics of how the Agora system used here work in practical terms? For instance do ballots have a QR code? How are the entered into the ledger at polling stations, etc? I'm happy to see articles on the practical benefits of blockchains. I feel like they been drowned out by the media hysteria of cryptocurrencies lately.
apo 9y ago
“Anonymized votes/ballots are being recorded on Agora’s blockchain, which will be publicly available for any interested party to review, count and validate,” said Gammar. The details on this vote have been extremely scarce. The use of the future tense to describe access is worrying. "Blockchain Technology" has attracted scoundrels of every stripe. If Agora really cares about this as a test case, it needs to make the voting records public, and articles like this one need to make it clear how the reader can examine the results. That said, I'm very skeptical about the utility of "Blockchain Technology" in voting. For one thing, what secures this block chain and makes fraud detectable? In Bitcoin, the answer is crystal clear: Proof-of-Work coupled to an economic incentive. This system has well-known scope and limitations. We can reason, mathematically, about a multitude of attacks and outcomes. Not so with the Agora system. And I'm afraid that journalists consistently refuse (or are not equipped) to ask the right questions - as in this article.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Karunamon 9y ago
  If I'm reading their whitepaper right, Agora appears to be a Bitcoin sidechain. https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf
- jfroma 9y ago
  What I don't understand about this is that even if it is mathematically and technologically perfect (which I assume will be really hard) how can non-technical people understand something so complex. I am a software developer and to be honest I don't fully understand bitcoin and blockchains. Then my next question will be how can I trust something that I don't understand. Maybe as a counter-argument someone will say how people uses online banking without fully understanding software, internet, etc. But I think is a completely different problem with different challenges.
  - specialist 9y ago
    Respectfully, the first mistake is the expectation of trust. I only have confidence in a system based on mutual distrust.
sly010 9y ago
"Agora relies on voting administrators to select an identity management system and provide a mechanism to authenticate voters. At the same time, Agora intends to work with digital identity providers to provide governments and institutions with digital identity solutions compatible with Agora’s voting system. We will place an emphasis on investigating solutions compatible with the latest advances in digital identity technology, notably decentralized and sovereign identity solutions such as uPort [48] and Civic. [57]" Does this basically mean authentication is centralized?
- luckycharms810 9y ago
  I would imagine the best you can do here is a quorum of centralized authentication services.
noballot 9y ago
If it's just electronic ballots recorded in a proprietary system by a private company, the system is as vulnerable as any other e-voting system. If we were to properly distribute the process by running a public key database and giving each citizen a private key by which to sign a message in the blockchain casting their vote, it introduces a new and far more insidious problem: the system now provides a receipt for each vote that a malicious actor could use to reliably buy votes on a massive scale with complete automation: visit a website, use your private key to prove you voted for their candidate, receive a bitcoin payout.
- specialist 9y ago
  "... electronic ballots recorded in a proprietary system by a private company..." This is the second biggest threat to elections. And probably the most timely. -- My tour of duty as an election integrity activist radically changed my worldview on these things. I previously thought the gear was the biggest problem. Now I know that the biggest threat is disruption. While well intentioned, HAVA caused a lot of disruption. Resulting in no one knows what the rules are. Ditto the continuous ongoing "reforms". Like changes in voter ID laws, rules, procedures. Moving poll sites. Etc. Any changes that must be made should be done incrementally, methodically. The second biggest threat is the privatization of our election administration. Like you observe. No private entity any where should be responsible for verifying eligibility, issuing ballots, counting votes. Election administration is the most fundamental function a democratic government performs, its prime responsibility. It must be performed by citizens working for the government to have any legitimacy whatsoever. The third biggest threat to our elections is our form of voting. The USA's FPTP (winner takes all) elections are very brittle, intolerant of the inevitable margin of error. Much better, for both democracy and election administration, would be to use Approval Voting and Proportional Representation. Yes, I still believe the gear we continue to use remains a big open untreated wound.
ineiti 9y ago
They did use our permissioned skipchain available on: https://github.com/dedis/cothority https://github.com/dedis/cothority and ran some nodes on a server. Instead of burning 200kWh for one transaction, a voting consensus system is enough. BTW, there is also an e voting system in that repo, using neff shuffles.
dorianm 9y ago
I would rather have a Delegative Democracy (that I'm implementing in the Points Project: https://pointsproject.org https://pointsproject.org)

542 points by grdeken 9y ago

This is an amazing milestone, and a stake in the heart of the idea that blockchain tech is no different than "tulip bulbs".

lukeqsee 9y ago
I don’t think anyone is saying blockchain tech is “tulip bulbs”. The concern is Bitcoin (an instance of blockchain tech), et al., are not all the proponents claim them to be. I’m convinced the blockchain is here to stay. Bitcoin? Not so much.
- colordrops 9y ago
  Fair enough, but there have been a lot of disparaging words said toward blockchains as well until recently.
  - Erlangolem 9y ago
    I don’t think I’ve seen any of that, just a sense of weariness and disgust with their applications in cryptocurrency. I think that the raw excitement over blockchain tech has been damped from the initial fire, given the issues around scalability, but it still seems to enjoy a lot of respect. The problem is usually that like AI, “blockchain” just gets slapped onto a lot of dogs in an attempt to get money. I wouldn’t confuse that with rejection of the blockchain tech, just the cynical implementations that have mostly emerged.
- Aqueous 9y ago
  actually a lot of people are saying that, mostly non-technical who have very little analogue for understanding why distributed consensus algorithms could have merit. I've been presented that analogy by several friends and my father, for instance.
- admyral 9y ago
  In my opinion, distributed ledgers and mutable blockchains based around trusted actors are business as usual and frankly not very interesting. Bitcoin could actually make everyone's life a little better. Isn't that what technology was meant to be?
- wpietri 9y ago
  Personally, I'm saying Bitcoin is tulip bulbs (or, in Sarah Jeong's excellent phrase, "math Beanie Babies"). The blockchain, on the other hand, I think is more like XML/XSLT: a really interesting technology that has almost no real-world use that couldn't be done more easily with some other technology. And that 15-20 years after its popularity will be similarly obscure. I've been looking for years, but, digital speculative pseudo-commodities aside, I still have not found an in-production, value-delivering use of blockchain technology that couldn't be done as well or better with some more well understood technology.
  - quickthrower2 9y ago
    XSLT is one of those things where an XSLT ninja can be super productive in transforming XML and do things much quicker than the coder using a general purpose language. But most of us don't use XSLT enough to get that good, so for most of us XSLT is harder than just coding something.
    - mikekchar 9y ago
      Kind of off topic, but just want to chip in to say that XSLT is awesome. The average programmer can learn it quite quickly. For me, the "killer application" for XSLT is screen scraping HTML. If you want to aggregate data that is spread across a whole bunch of websites, it absolutely rocks. It is especially good if your organisation uses a SaaS that doesn't give you access to an API. Even if you have an API, it is often an order of magnitude easier to do what you need to do in XSLT. Which reminds me, I've been meaning to generate burn down charts for Trello for a long time now...
      - wpietri 9y ago
        I'm not denying that XSLT is a neat technology. But for those who don't know the history, the vision was that XML would be this amazing interchange technology, and XSLT would be used to transform the XML as needed between and within apps, without needing real programmers. For example, I know of one top-10 website circa 2004 that had their Java programmers producing only XML output. Then, XSLT specialists would transform that into HTML for rendering. In theory, this provided a clear separation between back-end and front-end programmers. In practice, it was a giant clusterfuck, because any real work required coordinated changes at multiple levels. Although in theory the front-end work was independent, the reality was absurdly convoluted XSLT trying to turn not-very-good XML into something that rendered well on screen. Nobody sensible does this today. At the time, XML/XSLT was expected to be central to a new, better way of making software. But now it's a weird niche thing, because although it was technologically cool, it was not actually better for 99% of use cases.
aaron695 9y ago
“tulip bulbs” are only a multi billion $ industry. I'm pretty sure most people consider blockchain tech to be a trillion $ industry.
pishpash 9y ago
Whether it's a valid PoC or otherwise, it reminds me how the US is mired in hyper-political arguments about voter fraud/Diebold machine issues when time could be spent genuinely looking for improved processes of election.
simias 9y ago
Call me a Luddite but I still don't see it. It's still effectively a good old database rebranded as "blockchain" to sound cool and innovative. The tools to do something like that have existed for a long time. The big issue these days is that the word "blockchain" is so broad that it's almost meaningless. I'm sure cryptocurrency advocates see this election as a win for instance, but in essence what do cryptocurrencies and this voting architecture share besides this rather nebulous concept of "blockchain"? Clearly the election is neither trustless, nor particularly decentralized. Blockchain is not "tulip bulbs" (cryptocurrencies might be). Blockchain is like "cloud computing", "web 2.0", "web scale" or "full stack". It's a fancy marketing name that doesn't mean much on its own.

bdamm 9y ago

Blockchain-based elections seemed inevitable but I never saw it coming from a national election proxy-ballot first. I thought maybe stockholders at an AGM for a blue-chip company would be the first large-scale example.

ajhurliman 9y ago

Since this was just a proof of concept, I'd love to see the blockchain results compared to the actual results.

utnick 9y ago

by 'blockchain-based' they mean, a normal election happened with traditional voting, and then some of the vote counters uploaded the tally of the votes they counted to a private blockchain

thatf 9y ago
any quotes?
- QML 9y ago
  "The process, which aimed to prevent voter fraud in Sierra Leone, was powered by Agora, a blockchain voting solutions provider. The company used a permissioned blockchain to ensure that recorded data remained protected while also being transparent to the stakeholders, all of whom were given permitted access to the blockchain in order to tally the votes. During the process, initial votes that are recorded on ballot papers are to be counted by neutral observers. The procedure, being watched by Agora, is the key step to entering that data on to the blockchain." https://www.bitguru.co.uk/sierra-leone-presidential-election-powered-by-blockchain-voting/ https://www.bitguru.co.uk/sierra-leone-presidential-election...
  - fjsolwmv 9y ago
    How is block chain used, besides as a buzzword?
    - jacques_chester 9y ago
      It isn't. You'll note that they carefully failed to disabuse anyone of the notion that the entire thing took place online.

iokevins 9y ago

They used Agora: https://agora.vote/ https://agora.vote/ (Aside: forgot to turn off my extension and so it appeared as, 'Sierra Leone just ran the first "Multiple copies of a giant Excel spreadsheet"-based election') https://github.com/cynthiablee/blockchain-to-spreadsheet https://github.com/cynthiablee/blockchain-to-spreadsheet

geofft 9y ago
Well, it's a reasonable translation - what precisely makes this vote a "blockchain" and not just a giant Excel spreadsheet? There's no double-spend problem. There's a correct way to merge two ballots cast by the same private key: discard them both. Since all operations are mergeable in an arbitrary order, there's no need for proof-of-work or anything like that to determine which chain is the "correct" chain - any pile of ballots that contains all valid ballots is correct, and any partial pile can get the remaining ballots appended at the end. From the whitepaper it looks like they're running their own "skipchain," which they refer to as a form of blockchain, but looks to me like a cross between a Merkle tree and a skip list with no proof-of-work mechanism. (It seems like a genuinely useful / novel data structure, I just wouldn't call it a blockchain.) And they're running some sort of proof-of-work consensus to gate additions onto this skipchain, and periodically storing the state of the skipchain in the Bitcoin blockchain. I don't really understand why the latter two parts are necessary: the record of ballots should be self-authenticating, and it should be easy to tell if someone has removed a ballot, right? Is the idea that people are not likely to watch the skipchain a la CT log monitors, so they want to use Bitcoin because people already watch that? On the one hand, they appear to have real cryptographers nad real research behind this. On the other, saying "blockchain" seems like a great way for someone running an unfair election to make it appear more legitimate....
- zepolen 9y ago
  > There's a correct way to merge two ballots cast by the same private key: discard them both What about the scenario where someone puts a gun to your head and forces you to vote for them - and you can't change your vote at a later period?

KMag 9y ago

I cautiously applaud the progress. Back in Ron Rivest's 6.857 computer security class, we spent some time on electronic voting. If you're not careful to get the privacy right, you open up more opportunities for coercion. With anonymous paper ballots, coercion can and does happen, but it basically requires physical control of the polling station / voting booth to pull off. In this case, anonymized ballots are put on a blockchain. Hopefully the system is auditable, but provides no way for someone to prove which anonymized ballot serial number belongs to them. Otherwise, the thugs can come to your house and either beat you or pay you your bribe after forcing you to reveal how you voted.

craftyguy 9y ago
How do you provide anonymized ballots while at the same time guaranteeing that fraudulant voting is not taking place? It seems that being able to verify that a ballot came from an actual person authorized to vote (and not some bot) is key, but I'm not sure how to satisfy both.
- mvid 9y ago
  Perhaps with asymmetric key encryption? So someone can validate that a vote was theirs, but you can't pin a vote to a person without them doing so. It would require that everyone understood key management, which is probably untenable
  - GeneralMayhem 9y ago
    That doesn't guard against the lead pipe decryption strategy. The point is that you need a way to prove that a vote was yours, without any possible way to prove which vote was yours, whether you want to or not. I'm not a cryptography expert, but that sounds difficult if not logically impossible.
    - colordrops 9y ago
      How is lead pipe coercion currently handled?

piotrkaminski 9y ago

> thereby offering instant access to the election results. ... > it is still unclear who won

darawk 9y ago
Only 70% of the votes were using this system.
- kijin 9y ago
  Even when only 70% of the votes are counted, it should be pretty clear who got more votes than another. The problem in this case is that no candidate got a majority, so the top two will need to have a run-off election.
aptsurdist 9y ago
I think what actually happened is that no candidate won enough votes, so a runoff is required. "The National Electoral Commission (NEC) declared a runoff after none of the 16 presidential hopefuls on the March 7 ballot paper secured the 55% needed to secure an outright victory." http://www.africanews.com/2018/03/15/sierra-leone-presidential-runoff-here-are-the-two-kingmakers/ http://www.africanews.com/2018/03/15/sierra-leone-presidenti...

tzs 9y ago

How does it compare to Scantegrity [1]? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity

m3kw9 9y ago

I hope people there don’t automatically imply trust everytime they hear blockchain. If controlled by central authorities the blocks can be changed like text on a file.

zabil 9y ago

Does anyone know if this decentralized with miners rewarded with coins to keep the nodes and network running?

iamgopal 9y ago

In future, anybody with sufficient support can propose any change in legal system and have it backed up directly by individuals instead of elite parliamentary class. Will that happen ? That can remove whole election criteria.

pishpash 9y ago
That's basically referenda and direct democracy, and I don't think it's the technology that's holding that back.
ramblerman 9y ago
> anybody with sufficient support can propose any change in legal system so Switzerland?
Synaesthesia 9y ago
There’s nothing technical preventing this today, or anytime before. What’s been lacking is the political will and the class consciousness to implement it.

AlexCoventry 9y ago

I'm glad to see they've backed away from doing an ICO token for now. That was sketchy as hell.

thatf 9y ago

Found no description of how exactly people vote with Agora https://agora.vote/ https://agora.vote/: do they come to a place and press a button or do they download an app(or go to a web page) and press a button? Either way, I can't see how fraud is prevented even with a blockchain in place.

nimrod0 9y ago

Paper describing the Agora network: https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf

John_KZ 9y ago

Blockchain provides no advantage over other technologies in elections.

mozumder 9y ago

So, this is a great way for a major states to actually brute-force hack elections: have several millions of computers do proof-of-work for false ballot data.

finchisko 9y ago

I miss details here. 1. Can it be said that the election was electronic? If so, why is the headline saying they used blockchain and not elections was first time electronic. (I consider blockchain here only as implementation detail). 2. Could voters vote from home over wire or they had to come to some kind of booth that had electronic voting device in it?

c12 9y ago
It can be said that the election was electronic, however other countries have used electronic polling stations (notably the USA) and those have since been proven to be easily hacked and the results modified. The headline here stating the use of blockchain is important because its the first election on the planet that has used the implementation and its an implementation that can't be modified without trace. As for point two I have no idea, I am assuming it required people using voting booths but given the technology used, nothing is stopping it from allowing decentralized voting. edit: As it turns out it looks as though people voted using traditional paper ballets and it was inputted into the block chain via a neutral third party: https://www.bitguru.co.uk/sierra-leone-presidential-election-powered-by-blockchain-voting/ https://www.bitguru.co.uk/sierra-leone-presidential-election...

dschuetz 9y ago

I don't think that decentralized voting is a good thing at all. Voting will lose its significance when a vote can be issued with barely more than just a click. Elections and votes will become increasingly meaningless and much more frequent. Social interaction suffers greatly today, because of the success of Social Media, which was praised as a new and easy way to socially interact without going outside. Blockchain might be the right choice of technology for the voting process, people still need to be obliged to go to the city hall to issue their vote, in person!

juliendorra 9y ago
The Swiss have very frequent votes, with direct votes on several issues 3 or 4 times a year. That’s in addition to electing representatives. Of course they are the oldest continuous modern democracy. You could argue from the Swiss example that more voting occasions wouldn’t change the main issues of modern democracies, but it doesn’t seems to lower the importance of voting either, with a similar turn out that elsewhere. (Also, a technical solution to constant voting and flexible, transferable delegation of voting power is the main goal of the fluid democracy movement.)
- bjelkeman-again 9y ago
  The Swiss have a relatively low turnout for their voting. 47% http://www.electionguide.org/countries/id/207/ http://www.electionguide.org/countries/id/207/ It seems people only vote on what they care about. Which I think can be expected if there are many votes. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/yes-no-or-sometimes-_most-swiss-do-actually-vote/41963568 https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/yes-no-or-sometimes-_most-swiss...
deviationblue 9y ago
> people still need to be obliged to go to the city hall to issue their vote, in person! And you can also then police the undesirables by putting them through onerous identification processes. /sarcasm
icelancer 9y ago
>> Voting will lose its significance Don't worry; in the United States, it largely already has. Blockchain tech can't make it much worse. >> people still need to be obliged to go to the city hall to issue their vote, in person! Yeah, that's not ableist at all. Don't worry about those with limited transportation options. And piling tons of people into city hall will totally make people social again.... ???

braptor 9y ago

Good effort for trying, at least we have some potential even if it fails.

iafrikan 9y ago

Correction: Aroga, Swiss company, used blockchain to tally and track election results. Older thread below. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16578872

Twisell 9y ago

This has really gone to far. What’s next? Some dictator will run the first blockchain-based death sentence via a distributed big data popular jury to guarantee a fair and auditable trial? PS : forgot to mention this was a cloud based, severless solution developed by a scrum agile team while pair programming in a 6th generation language for extra scalability and safety.

deleted 9y ago

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headmelted 9y ago

I've got a question I didn't see answered in the article. Is the ledger hidden until the end of the election or publicly visible throughout? I only ask as it's a subtle technical difference that could massively influence the outcome.

amitbr 9y ago

In cryptography, a ring signature is a type of digital signature that can be performed by any member of a group of users that each have keys. Therefore, a message signed with a ring signature is endorsed by someone in a particular group of people. One of the security properties of a ring signature is that it should be computationally infeasible to determine which of the group members' keys was used to produce the signature. Ring signatures are similar to group signatures but differ in two key ways: first, there is no way to revoke the anonymity of an individual signature, and second, any group of users can be used as a group without additional setup. Ring signatures were invented by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Yael Tauman, and introduced at ASIACRYPT in 2001.[1] The name, ring signature, comes from the ring-like structure of the signature algorithm. Linkable ring signatures [4] The property of linkability allows one to determine whether any two signatures have been produced by the same member (under the same private key). The identity of the signer is nevertheless preserved. One of the possible applications can be an offline e-cash system. [link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_signature]

Kliment 9y ago
Linkable ring signatures are problematic because if someone can coerce you into signing a second message then they can identify who you voted for.

mtgx 9y ago

> His chosen successor, Samura Kamara, is being challenged by 15 other candidates > Experts say a presidential run-off is likely as a first-round win would require one candidate taking 55% of the vote. When even Sierra Leone has a more democratic voting system than Freedom Land™ (and I'm not talking about blockchains).

sannee 9y ago

Migrating elections to a technology one needs mathematics/CS PhD to understand just a part of from technology that can be understood by a middle schooler doesn't seem all that great. The article talks about "fully-transparent voting solution for this future", yet I somehow don't see any transparency when it all relies on magic only a negligible part of the population understands.

icelancer 9y ago
Plenty of idiots use an ATM and work with the financial system and all of its quirks without much issue, why would a blockchain-based system be any different?
- sannee 9y ago
  It's not about using the system as an "user". It's about the fact that it bases democracy on principles which are way beyond the mathematical capabilities of 99%+ of the electorate! I mean, if my government decides to use some crypto/blockhain magic, there is no way I can figure out if using hash algorithm H in a method X is valid choice or if it is a backdoor/negligence. This is an issue which simply does not happen with paper ballots (backdooring these is of course possible, but really expensive especially at scale). The attack surface is easy to reason out, unlike with cryptography. Maybe it does not matter though (and maybe I am afraid of mathematicians secretly taking over the world, ha!)
  - dwighttk 9y ago
    I think it matters
- specialist 9y ago
  Accounting uses double entry (credits & debits), election administration does not. Compulsory voting could make election administration look more like accounting. Blockchains explicitly remove privacy, whereas voting should be the Australian Ballot, aka private voting & public counting.
- 9y ago

beiller 9y ago

I think this is really cool. A trendy buzzword tech may bring more people to the polls, and the unforgable blockchain technology seems to have a use case here. I wonder how they prevent people from making multiple accounts. The fact that generally I find block chains slow, doesn't negatively affect this type of system. Great!

GenericsMotors 9y ago

"blockchain-based election" is a bit of a stretch. A third party recorded part of the election results using a blockchain. The election itself was still a paper ballot. Perhaps if the company had used Postgres to store the results there would have been an article called "Sierra Leone just ran the first RDBMS-based election"? Probably not, since relational DBs are not buzzword material.

meganibla 9y ago

Confirmation for the perspective that Africa is cyberpunk

juanmirocks 9y ago

I am positive about this first step. Looking forward to seeing more of this in for example (or rather specifically) Switzerland.

retox 9y ago

DO NOT ACCEPT ANY DIGITAL ONLY VOTING SYSTEM. UNLESS THERE IS A WAY TO PHYSICALLY AUDIT THE SYSTEM, AND ESPECIALLY YOUR OWN VOTE, ALL SUCH VOTES SHOULD BE CONSIDERED NULL AND VOID. DIGITAL ONLY VOTING IS A FORM OF VOTER SUPPRESSION AND CANNOT BE CONSIDERED LEGITIMATE.

sjapkee 9y ago
If you can't count all of the votes either phisycal or digital, you can't be sure that voting isn't compromised. So, you can never be sure.

tardo99 9y ago

Can someone explain to me how this works? Who are the miners? Where is the competition to mine blocks? How is the system distributed such that one entity can't back-propagate fabricated blocks into the chain?

Joool 9y ago
In their whitepaper [1] they mention storing cryptographic proofs on the Bitcoin blockchain (Section 3). However they do not seem to specify what proofs exactly. [1] https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf

bogomipz 9y ago

Can anyone comment on specifics of how the Agora system used here work in practical terms? For instance do ballots have a QR code? How are the entered into the ledger at polling stations, etc? I'm happy to see articles on the practical benefits of blockchains. I feel like they been drowned out by the media hysteria of cryptocurrencies lately.

apo 9y ago

“Anonymized votes/ballots are being recorded on Agora’s blockchain, which will be publicly available for any interested party to review, count and validate,” said Gammar. The details on this vote have been extremely scarce. The use of the future tense to describe access is worrying. "Blockchain Technology" has attracted scoundrels of every stripe. If Agora really cares about this as a test case, it needs to make the voting records public, and articles like this one need to make it clear how the reader can examine the results. That said, I'm very skeptical about the utility of "Blockchain Technology" in voting. For one thing, what secures this block chain and makes fraud detectable? In Bitcoin, the answer is crystal clear: Proof-of-Work coupled to an economic incentive. This system has well-known scope and limitations. We can reason, mathematically, about a multitude of attacks and outcomes. Not so with the Agora system. And I'm afraid that journalists consistently refuse (or are not equipped) to ask the right questions - as in this article.

deleted 9y ago
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Karunamon 9y ago
If I'm reading their whitepaper right, Agora appears to be a Bitcoin sidechain. https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf https://agora.vote/Agora_Whitepaper_v0.1.pdf
jfroma 9y ago
What I don't understand about this is that even if it is mathematically and technologically perfect (which I assume will be really hard) how can non-technical people understand something so complex. I am a software developer and to be honest I don't fully understand bitcoin and blockchains. Then my next question will be how can I trust something that I don't understand. Maybe as a counter-argument someone will say how people uses online banking without fully understanding software, internet, etc. But I think is a completely different problem with different challenges.
- specialist 9y ago
  Respectfully, the first mistake is the expectation of trust. I only have confidence in a system based on mutual distrust.

sly010 9y ago

"Agora relies on voting administrators to select an identity management system and provide a mechanism to authenticate voters. At the same time, Agora intends to work with digital identity providers to provide governments and institutions with digital identity solutions compatible with Agora’s voting system. We will place an emphasis on investigating solutions compatible with the latest advances in digital identity technology, notably decentralized and sovereign identity solutions such as uPort [48] and Civic. [57]" Does this basically mean authentication is centralized?

luckycharms810 9y ago
I would imagine the best you can do here is a quorum of centralized authentication services.

noballot 9y ago

If it's just electronic ballots recorded in a proprietary system by a private company, the system is as vulnerable as any other e-voting system. If we were to properly distribute the process by running a public key database and giving each citizen a private key by which to sign a message in the blockchain casting their vote, it introduces a new and far more insidious problem: the system now provides a receipt for each vote that a malicious actor could use to reliably buy votes on a massive scale with complete automation: visit a website, use your private key to prove you voted for their candidate, receive a bitcoin payout.

specialist 9y ago
"... electronic ballots recorded in a proprietary system by a private company..." This is the second biggest threat to elections. And probably the most timely. -- My tour of duty as an election integrity activist radically changed my worldview on these things. I previously thought the gear was the biggest problem. Now I know that the biggest threat is disruption. While well intentioned, HAVA caused a lot of disruption. Resulting in no one knows what the rules are. Ditto the continuous ongoing "reforms". Like changes in voter ID laws, rules, procedures. Moving poll sites. Etc. Any changes that must be made should be done incrementally, methodically. The second biggest threat is the privatization of our election administration. Like you observe. No private entity any where should be responsible for verifying eligibility, issuing ballots, counting votes. Election administration is the most fundamental function a democratic government performs, its prime responsibility. It must be performed by citizens working for the government to have any legitimacy whatsoever. The third biggest threat to our elections is our form of voting. The USA's FPTP (winner takes all) elections are very brittle, intolerant of the inevitable margin of error. Much better, for both democracy and election administration, would be to use Approval Voting and Proportional Representation. Yes, I still believe the gear we continue to use remains a big open untreated wound.

ineiti 9y ago

They did use our permissioned skipchain available on: https://github.com/dedis/cothority https://github.com/dedis/cothority and ran some nodes on a server. Instead of burning 200kWh for one transaction, a voting consensus system is enough. BTW, there is also an e voting system in that repo, using neff shuffles.

dorianm 9y ago

I would rather have a Delegative Democracy (that I'm implementing in the Points Project: https://pointsproject.org https://pointsproject.org)