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> With a public blockchain (or something like it) you could always look up your vote and by nature it cannot be changed. ... Am I missing something though? Bal

> With a public blockchain (or something like it) you could always look up your vote and by nature it cannot be changed. ... Am I missing something though? Ballot secrecy. Without it you get vote-buying and voter coercion. If you want to see what that looks like, ask your legislators about which lobbyists they met last week.

hmcdona1 9y ago
Good point! If keys/addresses were assigned in secret, I don't see how blockchain forensics could identify someone given that voting is simply transactions going one way. The only way might be time, but that could be a big give away. There's also people providing their public address as proof of a vote in exchange for something, but the risk for the buyer is that someone just hands over someone else's transaction and votes as they please. A real potential solution would be to make the votes private and "untraceable" (A la Monero ring signatures or something of the sort), but that kind of comes with it's own pros and cons and could always be broken later. I still think it's worth investigating if this is more secure than plain old paper ballots.
- jacques_chester 9y ago
  Or you could just stick to proved, simple reforms that have been introduced in Australia over the last century or so. Cryptography is powerful, but it tends to be on such an absurdly higher level of assurance inside its narrow applications that it becomes very attractive to try to stuff everything into it, whether or not that's warranted or useful. Democratic legitimacy comes from the volume of participating individuals who trust and understand the system. Paper ballots are easily understood, independent electoral commissions improve trustworthiness, election scrutineers ensure every room has mutually suspicious observers highly motivated to detect problems, compulsory voting helps ensure the median voter dominates policy and preferential voting helps prevent minority candidates from inverting majority preferences against bad candidates. None of these require a blockchain. It is a distraction from the actual reforms that will make the important differences.
  - hmcdona1 9y ago
    Fair enough, I fully admit to not being an expert on voting and don't know about any reforms taking place. I was simply stating that a blockchain solution might be better than just casting a plain paper ballot. The way OP worded his response made it seem like paper was the most secure end all be all solution. If there are other reforms in place I might agree.
    - jacques_chester 9y ago
      The thing is that as technologists, we see a software solution in every shadow. Sometimes software is the wrong solution, taking account of all the needs in hand. The kind of electoral systems most of us want requires both ballot secrecy and a trustworthy count. Pure software ballots don't achieve that. Paper ballots don't categorically achieve it either, but it's much harder to violate either of the secrecy or count requirements because paper is bulky and the watching eyeballs are numerous. In practical terms: paper ballots can be made to work. I'm from a country where they do. A blockchain system either works on a public chain, meaning I can sell my vote, or it uses a zero-proof scheme. The zero-proof schemes I'm aware of require someone, somewhere, to seed the chain with a private key. Then we're all just supposed to hope they deleted the one set of bits that can untraceably edit everybody's history. They pinky-swear they'll do it. But there's no way to prove they did, which rather sours the blockchain-can-prove-anything story. Not to mention the problem that they allow retrieval. Sure, you can't prove that I ever owned a particular ballot. But I can retrieve an identical ballot. That might work for evading money laundering charges but it still kinda fits the vote-selling usecase. It drives me nuts because this our love of reinvention and our fondness for assuming we can solve everything from first principles as if nobody's thought of these problems before. These problems are already solved in a simple, scalable, subversion-resistant way that everyone can understand. All we have to do is accept that, for once, our profession was not required to interrupt everyone else to give our opinion.
      - arthur_pryor 9y ago
        i regret that i have but one upvote to give

hmcdona1 9y ago

Good point! If keys/addresses were assigned in secret, I don't see how blockchain forensics could identify someone given that voting is simply transactions going one way. The only way might be time, but that could be a big give away. There's also people providing their public address as proof of a vote in exchange for something, but the risk for the buyer is that someone just hands over someone else's transaction and votes as they please. A real potential solution would be to make the votes private and "untraceable" (A la Monero ring signatures or something of the sort), but that kind of comes with it's own pros and cons and could always be broken later. I still think it's worth investigating if this is more secure than plain old paper ballots.

jacques_chester 9y ago
Or you could just stick to proved, simple reforms that have been introduced in Australia over the last century or so. Cryptography is powerful, but it tends to be on such an absurdly higher level of assurance inside its narrow applications that it becomes very attractive to try to stuff everything into it, whether or not that's warranted or useful. Democratic legitimacy comes from the volume of participating individuals who trust and understand the system. Paper ballots are easily understood, independent electoral commissions improve trustworthiness, election scrutineers ensure every room has mutually suspicious observers highly motivated to detect problems, compulsory voting helps ensure the median voter dominates policy and preferential voting helps prevent minority candidates from inverting majority preferences against bad candidates. None of these require a blockchain. It is a distraction from the actual reforms that will make the important differences.
- hmcdona1 9y ago
  Fair enough, I fully admit to not being an expert on voting and don't know about any reforms taking place. I was simply stating that a blockchain solution might be better than just casting a plain paper ballot. The way OP worded his response made it seem like paper was the most secure end all be all solution. If there are other reforms in place I might agree.
  - jacques_chester 9y ago
    The thing is that as technologists, we see a software solution in every shadow. Sometimes software is the wrong solution, taking account of all the needs in hand. The kind of electoral systems most of us want requires both ballot secrecy and a trustworthy count. Pure software ballots don't achieve that. Paper ballots don't categorically achieve it either, but it's much harder to violate either of the secrecy or count requirements because paper is bulky and the watching eyeballs are numerous. In practical terms: paper ballots can be made to work. I'm from a country where they do. A blockchain system either works on a public chain, meaning I can sell my vote, or it uses a zero-proof scheme. The zero-proof schemes I'm aware of require someone, somewhere, to seed the chain with a private key. Then we're all just supposed to hope they deleted the one set of bits that can untraceably edit everybody's history. They pinky-swear they'll do it. But there's no way to prove they did, which rather sours the blockchain-can-prove-anything story. Not to mention the problem that they allow retrieval. Sure, you can't prove that I ever owned a particular ballot. But I can retrieve an identical ballot. That might work for evading money laundering charges but it still kinda fits the vote-selling usecase. It drives me nuts because this our love of reinvention and our fondness for assuming we can solve everything from first principles as if nobody's thought of these problems before. These problems are already solved in a simple, scalable, subversion-resistant way that everyone can understand. All we have to do is accept that, for once, our profession was not required to interrupt everyone else to give our opinion.
    - arthur_pryor 9y ago
      i regret that i have but one upvote to give