5 ms·

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

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?
- Infernal 9y ago
  There is no way to prove you voted one way or another with anonymous ballots, so there is no incentive to bribing or threatening violence to influence your vote. The desired outcome is to prove that each vote came from a valid voter, while being impossible to prove which vote came from whom.
  - amitbr 9y ago
    There is a cryptographic primitive that does just this allowing of plausible deniability whilst ensuring that only persons able to vote voted: Using Linked Ring Signatures.
  - Mediterraneo10 9y ago
    > There is no way to prove you voted one way or another with anonymous ballots. The coercing party can insist that you take a mobile phone picture of your ballot. This kind of coercion is common in some regions of Russia where civil servants and teachers are told by their superiors that they must vote for the preferred party “or else”, and a mobile phone picture is demanded as proof.
    - KMag 9y ago
      The way around this is to give each person 1 ballot for each of N candidates. 1 ballot goes into an envelope and into the vote box. N-1 ballots go into envelopes and into the discard box. It's trivial to show a photo of your ballot for Dr. Evil, but it would take a video of you going into the voting booth, closely following your hands to prevent three-card-monty, and continuing to follow you into the public lobby containing the vote and discard boxes. If you strictly enforce no recording in the public lobby, then there's no way for you to prove to your boss which box got your ballot for Dr. Evil in the end. Edit: Perhaps I wasn't clear. Each of the N ballots is already filled out for a different candidate. The envelopes are all identical and sealed by you inside the voting booth. That way an existence proof of a ballot for the given candidate leaks absolutely no information. There are no empty paper ballots, and none of the paper ballots can leave the polling station. Ballots need to be counted both from the "vote" and from the "discard" boxes. Ballots missing from the discard box prove vote tampering.
      - tschwimmer 9y ago
        I suspect the envelope with the good ballot is sealed in some way. All they would have to do in that case is force you to take a picture of the sealed ballot with the non-desired ballots next to it.
        KMag 9y ago
        All of the envelopes are identical. Absolutely the only difference is which envelope goes into which ballot box. Taking a photo of N-1 ballots for non-Dr. Evil next to one sealed envelope only discloses that the Dr. Evil ballot was put into an envelope first. It gives no information as to which box that envelope was placed into later, and therefore leaks no information about how the vote was cast.
      - chris_engel 9y ago
        So you just need to take N photos with the correct voteon every ballot. No matter which will be discarted.
        9y ago
    - germanier 9y ago
      We try to combat this in two ways in Germany (not that it currently poses a problem but still): 1. Voters can destroy their ballot before putting it into the box and get a new one for any reason thus making it possible to create fake proof. 2. Taking pictures inside the booth is explicitly prohibited (which stated on signs in the booth) and if the poll workers notice you taking a picture they require you to destroy the ballot and fill out a new one. I actually had to do this to a women last election who wanted to post a picture on social media – and didn't turn off the shutter sound. This requires the poll workers to be somewhat impartial. If they are not all bets are off. In the German Democratic Republic voters where socially pressured (by official policy) to not use the booths at all.
      - zaarn 9y ago
        Taking pictures in the booth isn't actually prohibited. You can do it but the helpers will probably take your ballot and destroy it, then give you another one. (An exception is when you are a government delegate voting for chancellor, in which case you pay a fine of 1000€, especially after the president has clarified this rule to new delegates repeatedly)
        germanier 9y ago
        It depends on your definition (there is no fine or anything) but it's now explicitly prohibited and poll workers are required to reject such voters (and give them a new ballot), see § 56 Abs. 2, 6 Nr. 5a BWO.
        Freak_NL 9y ago
        We've actually had members of parliament in the Netherlands proudly show of the selfies they took in the ballot booth with their ballot on Twitter, encouraging people to take selfies (nicknamed 'stemfies'; a portmanteau of vote ('stem') and selfie) to show that (and how!) you voted on social media. The election council and a lot of privacy-conscious citizens weren't amused to say the least, but a subsequent ruling by a judge turned out that it isn't strictly speaking illegal, because the law doesn't explicitly prohibit photography in the ballot booth. So until parliament enacts a law that forbids it (like Germany), we are stuck with this rather dubious phenomenon. At least we've banned voting computers for a good while — the ones we had ran closed source software and the votes cast couldn't be verified by the voters or the election council — so there's that.
  - colordrops 9y ago
    Why is that any different from being anonymous on a blockchain?
    - Armisael16 9y ago
      It isn’t unless you have some way to verify your vote. Lots of blockchain ideas offer that, though.
meeton 9y ago
How about this: when you get into the booth you're given an ID. You then cast your vote for Ms A and you can see on the block chain that it was recorded for A. After you cast, the system shows you a bunch of ids on the chain which voted for other candidates and you can memorise the id shown that voted for Mr B. When people come round, you tell them that other id. When they look it up they see that it voted for B and leave you alone. That doesn't solve the potential problem of vote stuffing... Still thinking about that one.
- snakeboy 9y ago
  However in this setup, anyone can bring a smartphone in and take a picture of the screen when it displays anything that separates your id from a fake one. Sounds like you might be on the right track if you can get over that hurdle somehow.
  - kybernetikos 9y ago
    The smartphone problem exists currently with paper ballots. You're not supposed to be allowed to bring a camera into the voting booth, but this is not enforced particularly well. One approach to this problem is to make it easy to cancel a previous ballot and submit a new one, so you can get your evidence that you voted the way e.g. your employer wanted you to, but then you can cancel it and vote with your conscience.
    - rjmunro 9y ago
      As far as I can remember from the instructions last time I voted, in Britain you can do this, just return the ballot to the person handing them out and say that you made a mistake, and they should issue you a replacement.
    - feborges 9y ago
      In the Brazilian voting machine this is often done. You type the numbers and it loads the candidate info in the screen. Once you click [Confirm] the screen gets blank with the message of success. Therefore the only way to take a picture is before the vote is actually processed. You have a [Reset] button to re-enter the numbers.

colordrops 9y ago

How is lead pipe coercion currently handled?

Infernal 9y ago
There is no way to prove you voted one way or another with anonymous ballots, so there is no incentive to bribing or threatening violence to influence your vote. The desired outcome is to prove that each vote came from a valid voter, while being impossible to prove which vote came from whom.
- amitbr 9y ago
  There is a cryptographic primitive that does just this allowing of plausible deniability whilst ensuring that only persons able to vote voted: Using Linked Ring Signatures.
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago
  > There is no way to prove you voted one way or another with anonymous ballots. The coercing party can insist that you take a mobile phone picture of your ballot. This kind of coercion is common in some regions of Russia where civil servants and teachers are told by their superiors that they must vote for the preferred party “or else”, and a mobile phone picture is demanded as proof.
  - KMag 9y ago
    The way around this is to give each person 1 ballot for each of N candidates. 1 ballot goes into an envelope and into the vote box. N-1 ballots go into envelopes and into the discard box. It's trivial to show a photo of your ballot for Dr. Evil, but it would take a video of you going into the voting booth, closely following your hands to prevent three-card-monty, and continuing to follow you into the public lobby containing the vote and discard boxes. If you strictly enforce no recording in the public lobby, then there's no way for you to prove to your boss which box got your ballot for Dr. Evil in the end. Edit: Perhaps I wasn't clear. Each of the N ballots is already filled out for a different candidate. The envelopes are all identical and sealed by you inside the voting booth. That way an existence proof of a ballot for the given candidate leaks absolutely no information. There are no empty paper ballots, and none of the paper ballots can leave the polling station. Ballots need to be counted both from the "vote" and from the "discard" boxes. Ballots missing from the discard box prove vote tampering.
    - tschwimmer 9y ago
      I suspect the envelope with the good ballot is sealed in some way. All they would have to do in that case is force you to take a picture of the sealed ballot with the non-desired ballots next to it.
      - KMag 9y ago
        All of the envelopes are identical. Absolutely the only difference is which envelope goes into which ballot box. Taking a photo of N-1 ballots for non-Dr. Evil next to one sealed envelope only discloses that the Dr. Evil ballot was put into an envelope first. It gives no information as to which box that envelope was placed into later, and therefore leaks no information about how the vote was cast.
    - chris_engel 9y ago
      So you just need to take N photos with the correct voteon every ballot. No matter which will be discarted.
      - 9y ago
  - germanier 9y ago
    We try to combat this in two ways in Germany (not that it currently poses a problem but still): 1. Voters can destroy their ballot before putting it into the box and get a new one for any reason thus making it possible to create fake proof. 2. Taking pictures inside the booth is explicitly prohibited (which stated on signs in the booth) and if the poll workers notice you taking a picture they require you to destroy the ballot and fill out a new one. I actually had to do this to a women last election who wanted to post a picture on social media – and didn't turn off the shutter sound. This requires the poll workers to be somewhat impartial. If they are not all bets are off. In the German Democratic Republic voters where socially pressured (by official policy) to not use the booths at all.
    - zaarn 9y ago
      Taking pictures in the booth isn't actually prohibited. You can do it but the helpers will probably take your ballot and destroy it, then give you another one. (An exception is when you are a government delegate voting for chancellor, in which case you pay a fine of 1000€, especially after the president has clarified this rule to new delegates repeatedly)
      - germanier 9y ago
        It depends on your definition (there is no fine or anything) but it's now explicitly prohibited and poll workers are required to reject such voters (and give them a new ballot), see § 56 Abs. 2, 6 Nr. 5a BWO.
      - Freak_NL 9y ago
        We've actually had members of parliament in the Netherlands proudly show of the selfies they took in the ballot booth with their ballot on Twitter, encouraging people to take selfies (nicknamed 'stemfies'; a portmanteau of vote ('stem') and selfie) to show that (and how!) you voted on social media. The election council and a lot of privacy-conscious citizens weren't amused to say the least, but a subsequent ruling by a judge turned out that it isn't strictly speaking illegal, because the law doesn't explicitly prohibit photography in the ballot booth. So until parliament enacts a law that forbids it (like Germany), we are stuck with this rather dubious phenomenon. At least we've banned voting computers for a good while — the ones we had ran closed source software and the votes cast couldn't be verified by the voters or the election council — so there's that.
- colordrops 9y ago
  Why is that any different from being anonymous on a blockchain?
  - Armisael16 9y ago
    It isn’t unless you have some way to verify your vote. Lots of blockchain ideas offer that, though.

meeton 9y ago

How about this: when you get into the booth you're given an ID. You then cast your vote for Ms A and you can see on the block chain that it was recorded for A. After you cast, the system shows you a bunch of ids on the chain which voted for other candidates and you can memorise the id shown that voted for Mr B. When people come round, you tell them that other id. When they look it up they see that it voted for B and leave you alone. That doesn't solve the potential problem of vote stuffing... Still thinking about that one.

snakeboy 9y ago
However in this setup, anyone can bring a smartphone in and take a picture of the screen when it displays anything that separates your id from a fake one. Sounds like you might be on the right track if you can get over that hurdle somehow.
- kybernetikos 9y ago
  The smartphone problem exists currently with paper ballots. You're not supposed to be allowed to bring a camera into the voting booth, but this is not enforced particularly well. One approach to this problem is to make it easy to cancel a previous ballot and submit a new one, so you can get your evidence that you voted the way e.g. your employer wanted you to, but then you can cancel it and vote with your conscience.
  - rjmunro 9y ago
    As far as I can remember from the instructions last time I voted, in Britain you can do this, just return the ballot to the person handing them out and say that you made a mistake, and they should issue you a replacement.
  - feborges 9y ago
    In the Brazilian voting machine this is often done. You type the numbers and it loads the candidate info in the screen. Once you click [Confirm] the screen gets blank with the message of success. Therefore the only way to take a picture is before the vote is actually processed. You have a [Reset] button to re-enter the numbers.