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I have yet to see how blockchain is supposed to solve problems with elections that can't be solved with good process. And if process isn't fixed, I don't see ho

by beat 9y ago

I have yet to see how blockchain is supposed to solve problems with elections that can't be solved with good process. And if process isn't fixed, I don't see how blockchain alone will get around the process shortcomings. Elections are no different than any other info security problem. Multiple checks at multiple locations in the process. Blockchain is not magic pixie dust that makes info security issues go away.

bdamm 9y ago
It's almost like people are thinking of blockchain as a global immutable append-only log with source attribution. Then the main question is, is what you're willing to pay to append a record more than what the operators (miners) are willing to accept to append a record? In the case of elections, I don't know a lot of governments that would be willing to pay to do what they do for free today.
- hudon 9y ago
  Not only that, but the blockchain is not even immutable... Forks happen all the time and the developers end up arbitrarily choosing which fork is the real blockchain. Anyone that was using the other fork in the meantime sees their chain mutate (gets wiped out, essentially) or be given a different name. So basically even IF the blockchain was not costly, the nation would need to control the developers to control the blockchain in the case of consensus failure (fork) to make sure no one messes with the election results.
  - darawk 9y ago
    > Not only that, but the blockchain is not even immutable... Forks happen all the time and the developers end up arbitrarily choosing which fork is the real blockchain. Anyone that was using the other fork in the meantime sees their chain mutate (gets wiped out, essentially) or be given a different name. Yes they are. That's not what 'immutable' means. Immutability refers to an inability to change the past. Not an inability to fork the future. A blockchain is a persistent, immutable data structure. This is just a simple fact of computer science.
    - hudon 9y ago
      When a chain fails to find consensus and forks due to different consensus rules, the 2 chains persist until the developers tell us which chain is the right one. Let's take the 2013 Bitcoin fork for example. OK now a merchant who has accepted Bitcoin on one chain could have had a transaction that was 20 blocks deep. Then, when the miners decide to abandon that chain and obey the developers and go on the other chain, the merchant's transaction is no longer confirmed if it wasn't played on the other chain. This is how blockchain consensus failures change the past of the ledger and therefore how the blockchain fails to be immutable by your definition. side note: I'd be wary of calling blockchain's consensus mechanism "computer science", it's more of a social consensus when consensus rules are different (ie. when forks are involved).
      - darawk 9y ago
        I didn't say consensus can't fail. I said it's immutable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immutable_object https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immutable_object Blockchains are immutable. Immutability is the property you want for elections. Blockchains are absolutely computer science. The consensus PoW mechanism is not part of 'blockchains'. It is a part of cryptocurrencies. Blockchains are simply a log-structured Merkle tree.
        hudon 9y ago
        Repeating things don't make them true. You defined immutability as the inability of changing the past. I have provided you an example of the past of Bitcoin being changed (24 blocks were invalidated). I await your rebuttal.
        darawk 9y ago
        That isn't changing the past. It's changing the interpretation of the past. The old transactions are still there, they're just not considered valid. That's fine. An election blockchain can't enforce its result anyway. A dictator can always simply say "yep, I got voted against, but too bad, i'm staying". What's important though, is that in a blockchain based system, that dictator would not be able to claim legitimacy convincingly. We would know and be able to prove that they invalidated or ignored the results. They cannot invalidate/ignore the true tally without everyone knowing they did it, just like you know that those Bitcoin transactions were invalidated. That is exactly the point.
- beat 9y ago
  It's not just that... it's unabashed technofetishism, using a very pretty Golden Hammer to solve problems that don't necessarily exist.
  - darawk 9y ago
    You think that problems with election legitimacy don't exist? They definitely do. Especially in non-western countries, but even in western countries there are often questions of legitimacy. Blockchains have the potential to remove all doubt. I'd say that's a pretty worthwhile goal. That being said, this particular project is not a good example of any of that. But blockchain for elections is actually one of the few truly technically legitimate uses of the technology.
    - zbentley 9y ago
      > Blockchains have the potential to remove all doubt. Secure cryptography and other algorithms that verify authenticity have the potential to remove all doubt. Blockchain has very little to do with it.
      - darawk 9y ago
        Yes, but blockchains are a particularly suitable form of this technology, because they are decentralized. Not in the sense that people normally mean, mind you, but simply because they allow the unsynchronized, simultaneous submission of votes from around a country in a technically convenient way.
    - arthur_pryor 9y ago
      > Blockchains have the potential to remove all doubt. given a very specific and likely untenable list of assumptions about the way the entire human system works, yes, i'd agree that they might remove all doubt. outside of textbooks, i think plenty of other comments here have cast doubt on how a blockchain voting implementation would solve real world problems in practice.
- darawk 9y ago
  > Then the main question is, is what you're willing to pay to append a record more than what the operators (miners) are willing to accept to append a record? In the case of elections, I don't know a lot of governments that would be willing to pay to do what they do for free today. If a government is holding fair elections, they should be willing to spend money on the opportunity to prove that they are fair. That being said, you don't actually need mining in an election-based blockchain. Mining/PoW exist to solve the 'double spend' problem - but that's just a race condition. There's no need to worry about race conditions in elections. The global consensus can be computed slowly. The important property that you want is that each individual voter be able to mathematically verify that their own personal vote was counted towards the total, and counted correctly. Blockchains do offer that capability.
darawk 9y ago
> I have yet to see how blockchain is supposed to solve problems with elections that can't be solved with good process. And if process isn't fixed, I don't see how blockchain alone will get around the process shortcomings. Blockchains provide a verifiably immutable log. This is the exact primitive you want for elections - tamper-proof logging. It is genuinely a good technological solution to the problems of election legitimacy and validation. That isn't a defense of this article, or of any of the current blockchain/election projects, but in principle, the idea makes sense.
- spydum 9y ago
  I'd say a significant amount of our problems are not transaction log failures - they are authentication/identity failures. The catch is that blockchain technologies force you to solve both (you cant take part in a transaction without an identity, can you?). Plenty of people who've lost wallets will concede this is still hard (what happens when you lose your government issued private-key, for example?).
  - darawk 9y ago
    I agree that blockchains do not solve all of the problems with elections. Here's what blockchain can offer, assuming you have a cryptographic identity mechanism (which has its own problems, of course): 1. Any person can validate that their vote was counted. 2. Any person can validate that their voted counted towards their intended candidate. 3. The collective can validate that no person (i.e. no crypto-id) voted twice. 4. The collective can validate the exact true number of tallied votes (and, e.g. make sure it doesn't exceed the total number of eligible voters). 5. The collective can validate the tallying process. I.e. they can count all the votes on the chain, and themselves reproduce the sums. That does not address the following: 1. Ensuring that a crypto-id was used by the appropriate person (Although if someone stole your ID, this would likely be discovered by the person it was stolen from, due to previous property #2). 2. Ensuring that a person was not coerced to use their crypto-id against their will. Which are real problems that I would love to see solutions to. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to solve those first 4 as well.

by beat 9y ago

bdamm 9y ago

It's almost like people are thinking of blockchain as a global immutable append-only log with source attribution. Then the main question is, is what you're willing to pay to append a record more than what the operators (miners) are willing to accept to append a record? In the case of elections, I don't know a lot of governments that would be willing to pay to do what they do for free today.

hudon 9y ago
Not only that, but the blockchain is not even immutable... Forks happen all the time and the developers end up arbitrarily choosing which fork is the real blockchain. Anyone that was using the other fork in the meantime sees their chain mutate (gets wiped out, essentially) or be given a different name. So basically even IF the blockchain was not costly, the nation would need to control the developers to control the blockchain in the case of consensus failure (fork) to make sure no one messes with the election results.
- darawk 9y ago
  > Not only that, but the blockchain is not even immutable... Forks happen all the time and the developers end up arbitrarily choosing which fork is the real blockchain. Anyone that was using the other fork in the meantime sees their chain mutate (gets wiped out, essentially) or be given a different name. Yes they are. That's not what 'immutable' means. Immutability refers to an inability to change the past. Not an inability to fork the future. A blockchain is a persistent, immutable data structure. This is just a simple fact of computer science.
  - hudon 9y ago
    When a chain fails to find consensus and forks due to different consensus rules, the 2 chains persist until the developers tell us which chain is the right one. Let's take the 2013 Bitcoin fork for example. OK now a merchant who has accepted Bitcoin on one chain could have had a transaction that was 20 blocks deep. Then, when the miners decide to abandon that chain and obey the developers and go on the other chain, the merchant's transaction is no longer confirmed if it wasn't played on the other chain. This is how blockchain consensus failures change the past of the ledger and therefore how the blockchain fails to be immutable by your definition. side note: I'd be wary of calling blockchain's consensus mechanism "computer science", it's more of a social consensus when consensus rules are different (ie. when forks are involved).
    - darawk 9y ago
      I didn't say consensus can't fail. I said it's immutable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immutable_object https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immutable_object Blockchains are immutable. Immutability is the property you want for elections. Blockchains are absolutely computer science. The consensus PoW mechanism is not part of 'blockchains'. It is a part of cryptocurrencies. Blockchains are simply a log-structured Merkle tree.
      - hudon 9y ago
        Repeating things don't make them true. You defined immutability as the inability of changing the past. I have provided you an example of the past of Bitcoin being changed (24 blocks were invalidated). I await your rebuttal.
        darawk 9y ago
        That isn't changing the past. It's changing the interpretation of the past. The old transactions are still there, they're just not considered valid. That's fine. An election blockchain can't enforce its result anyway. A dictator can always simply say "yep, I got voted against, but too bad, i'm staying". What's important though, is that in a blockchain based system, that dictator would not be able to claim legitimacy convincingly. We would know and be able to prove that they invalidated or ignored the results. They cannot invalidate/ignore the true tally without everyone knowing they did it, just like you know that those Bitcoin transactions were invalidated. That is exactly the point.
beat 9y ago
It's not just that... it's unabashed technofetishism, using a very pretty Golden Hammer to solve problems that don't necessarily exist.
- darawk 9y ago
  You think that problems with election legitimacy don't exist? They definitely do. Especially in non-western countries, but even in western countries there are often questions of legitimacy. Blockchains have the potential to remove all doubt. I'd say that's a pretty worthwhile goal. That being said, this particular project is not a good example of any of that. But blockchain for elections is actually one of the few truly technically legitimate uses of the technology.
  - zbentley 9y ago
    > Blockchains have the potential to remove all doubt. Secure cryptography and other algorithms that verify authenticity have the potential to remove all doubt. Blockchain has very little to do with it.
    - darawk 9y ago
      Yes, but blockchains are a particularly suitable form of this technology, because they are decentralized. Not in the sense that people normally mean, mind you, but simply because they allow the unsynchronized, simultaneous submission of votes from around a country in a technically convenient way.
  - arthur_pryor 9y ago
    > Blockchains have the potential to remove all doubt. given a very specific and likely untenable list of assumptions about the way the entire human system works, yes, i'd agree that they might remove all doubt. outside of textbooks, i think plenty of other comments here have cast doubt on how a blockchain voting implementation would solve real world problems in practice.
darawk 9y ago
> Then the main question is, is what you're willing to pay to append a record more than what the operators (miners) are willing to accept to append a record? In the case of elections, I don't know a lot of governments that would be willing to pay to do what they do for free today. If a government is holding fair elections, they should be willing to spend money on the opportunity to prove that they are fair. That being said, you don't actually need mining in an election-based blockchain. Mining/PoW exist to solve the 'double spend' problem - but that's just a race condition. There's no need to worry about race conditions in elections. The global consensus can be computed slowly. The important property that you want is that each individual voter be able to mathematically verify that their own personal vote was counted towards the total, and counted correctly. Blockchains do offer that capability.

darawk 9y ago

> I have yet to see how blockchain is supposed to solve problems with elections that can't be solved with good process. And if process isn't fixed, I don't see how blockchain alone will get around the process shortcomings. Blockchains provide a verifiably immutable log. This is the exact primitive you want for elections - tamper-proof logging. It is genuinely a good technological solution to the problems of election legitimacy and validation. That isn't a defense of this article, or of any of the current blockchain/election projects, but in principle, the idea makes sense.

spydum 9y ago
I'd say a significant amount of our problems are not transaction log failures - they are authentication/identity failures. The catch is that blockchain technologies force you to solve both (you cant take part in a transaction without an identity, can you?). Plenty of people who've lost wallets will concede this is still hard (what happens when you lose your government issued private-key, for example?).
- darawk 9y ago
  I agree that blockchains do not solve all of the problems with elections. Here's what blockchain can offer, assuming you have a cryptographic identity mechanism (which has its own problems, of course): 1. Any person can validate that their vote was counted. 2. Any person can validate that their voted counted towards their intended candidate. 3. The collective can validate that no person (i.e. no crypto-id) voted twice. 4. The collective can validate the exact true number of tallied votes (and, e.g. make sure it doesn't exceed the total number of eligible voters). 5. The collective can validate the tallying process. I.e. they can count all the votes on the chain, and themselves reproduce the sums. That does not address the following: 1. Ensuring that a crypto-id was used by the appropriate person (Although if someone stole your ID, this would likely be discovered by the person it was stolen from, due to previous property #2). 2. Ensuring that a person was not coerced to use their crypto-id against their will. Which are real problems that I would love to see solutions to. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to solve those first 4 as well.