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But such a system is incompatible with the secret ballot, and is therefore vulnerable to voter coercion. Didn't vote for the right candidate? You're fired "fo

• orev 8y ago
  The votes can be public but that doesn’t mean the data needs to include information that identifies the voter.
  • gcb0 8y ago
    then what's the point? can you list a single use case that would make sense with this idea?
    • orev 8y ago
      Yes. Voting. That’s how voting works. You go to the polling place, you confirm your identity with one person, then you go to another person to get the ballot. There is no linkage between your ballot and your identity, as they are done in separate and independent steps.
• joshfraser 8y ago
  It would be pseudo-anonymous like Bitcoin. You would keep the mapping between public keys and real-world identities private. But perhaps some percentage of people would choose to waive their right to privacy, further strengthening trust in the system. Statistically, the public voters should be in line with the final outcome.
  • orev 8y ago
    There’s no reason to have identifying information at all. That would be handled at the voting location just like it is now. Blockchain voting doesn’t mean you can then vote over the Internet — you’d just have a better type of system in place at the voting locations.
    • jakeogh 8y ago
      Incrementalism is powerful.
  • jammygit 8y ago
    I suppose every election they could randomly distribute voter ids that are unique to that election? Ie, pull an I'd from a hat at the polling station then use it and keep it for verification? Edit: undo auto'correct'
    • hannasanarion 8y ago
      Because now you can prove to anybody which way you voted, opening yourself to blackmail, bribery, or duress. The secrecy of the vote is crucial to its integrity.
      • kazagistar 8y ago
        Maybe you could move things down the chain: make it illegal for any entity (with perhaps some exceptions for anonymity compliant polling) to ask for voting proof, with very significant felony punishments (large organizational fines, jailtime for individuals).
        • hannasanarion 8y ago
          Or you can just use a voting system where producing proof is non-trivial, like paper ballots.
        • xorcist 8y ago
          You may not want to sell your vote, but others will. And the mere suspicion that other people can sell their votes erodes trust in the system, making it useless for a democracy.
        • jakeogh 8y ago
          Criminals don't follow laws. Plenty of things are felonies, they still happen, often.
    • joshfraser 8y ago
      "The secrecy of the vote is crucial to its integrity." Secrecy is also what makes it possible to stuff the ballot box with fake votes.
  • rectang 8y ago
    I don't have such faith in blockchain anonymity. Data will leak. See the paper "Backpage and Bitcoin: Uncovering Human Traffickers" which talks about using timing based reconciliation, relationships between wallets, and superficial metadata within Bitcoin to deanonymize human traffickers: http://www.sysnet.ucsd.edu/sysnet/miscpapers/backcoin-kdd17.pdf http://www.sysnet.ucsd.edu/sysnet/miscpapers/backcoin-kdd17....
  • mcintyre1994 8y ago
    > But perhaps some percentage of people would choose to waive their right to privacy, further strengthening trust in the system. This has the same problem. Didn't waive your right to privacy and provably vote for the right candidate - you're fired (or worse). That's why taking photos of a ballot isn't allowed, you can't have any way to show who you voted for.
    • joshfraser 8y ago
      But what if our elections are rigged and we don't know it? Is it worth risking a faked election as long as we all feel good about it?
      • probably_wrong 8y ago
        As someone else in the thread pointed out, we already know of a better solution: paper. Any other solution so far turns out to be either convoluted and/or not as good. Somewhat related, it reminds me of this anecdote about hand-warming handlebars on bikes: http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Complicator_0x27_s_Gloves http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Complicator_0x27_s_Glove...
      • joshfraser 8y ago
        The problem with paper is that it's too easy to remove and replace the ballots you don't like.
        • ABCLAW 8y ago
          Not really. Best practices in the field involve having representatives from many to all parties present at each step of the voting process, from the distribution of ballots at the booth, to the counting, to the archiving of counted boxes pending recounts.
        • nomel 8y ago
          Being physical, you would physically have to remove the previous vote first. This would require some combination of a chemical process, color matching, and/or glue piecing back on. This all takes time, tight tolerances, and automation to a happen at an impactful scale, which minimal oversight would mostly prevent. Compare this to an SQL statement to change a whole states worth of votes in a few hundred milliseconds. You can always recount the paper. Whatever solution, it require the limitation of involving something physical and difficult to manipulate.
  • umanwizard 8y ago
    If it’s even possible to waive anonymity, people will try to entice or coerce others to vote in a certain way, and require they prove it. That’s why taking a picture of your ballot is illegal in the US. This isn’t just a theoretical concern - there are various real-life allegations of it happening, in Southeastern Europe and other places.
    • alexandercrohde 8y ago
      Meh, the concern of the integrity of the election itself is a thousand or a million times more pressing than the concern about somebody trying to coerce somebody. Plus such coercion isn't impossible now, like you said it can be done with a camera. Presumably if you're being coerced by threat the "illegal" doesn't really help you at all. It seems obscene to me to pass up such an obvious improvement like a verifiable record over such a theoretical concern.
      • hannasanarion 8y ago
        You know what else is verifiable? Paper.
        • joshfraser 8y ago
          For the record, I far prefer paper ballots over closed-source digital voting.
      • ABCLAW 8y ago
        >Meh, the concern of the integrity of the election itself is a thousand or a million times more pressing than the concern about somebody trying to coerce somebody. 1) Coercion is literally the biggest concern within elections. You put a big guy with a pair of brass knuckles outside of the polling location and he beats up everyone who comes out without a picture of his ballot with the right vote in place. Theoretical? Lol. This WAS and IS common. This is why we have international election observers. 2) There's no integrity loss with paper if things are done right. Every ballot given out at a voting booth is recorded - you can't stuff the box as a voter. The only way you can do so is if election officials from all parties collude to fudge the books together, which they would need to do in view of the public as they man the voting desks, or under the supervision of the locale manager during the end-of-night count.
  • astrodust 8y ago
    Can we just not blockchain voting and move on to other things? Thanks.
  • Izkata 8y ago
    > Statistically, the public voters should be in line with the final outcome. Not likely. Social stigma means the "acceptable" candidate would have a larger proportion of the public votes than total votes. For example, the Democrat candidate in Chicago.
  • village-idiot 8y ago
    The problem with blockchains in this situation is that your security has to be perfect forever. If anyone figures out a way to de-anonymize votes, they get all of them due to the public and append only nature of blockchain systems.
• logfromblammo 8y ago
  The voting system sends out postcards to registered voters with a temper-evident scratch-off covering, over a private key. This key can be used with a personal computer, or public voting computer, each using the same open-source, audited software, to produce a printed ballot with a 2D barcode on it, and a printed voting token with a 2D barcode on it. The ballot printout can be scanned and verified independently, before casting it, that all the choices are correct. Again, all using the same open-source, audited software as the public vote-recording computers. This printout contains a hash of the voting token. This is so a party can't just print out a bunch of pre-filled ballots, and then hand them out for voters to cast, and also useful for recounts and audits. A separate printout encodes the voting token. It cryptographically verifies that a registered voter is voting now. The voter registration system associates a different hash of the voting token, a voter hash, with the voter. The voting system can associate the ballot hash of the voting token with the voting choices. If you have a voting token, you can compute the voter hash, look up the registered voter on the voter site, compute the ballot hash, and look up what their votes were on the vote-counting site. You can't tell whether that particular ballot is the one that counts for that voter. Because up until the end of the election, the voter can also request a new token, which invalidates their previous ballot, and cast a new one. That token will also be associated with their votes and their name, but the official election system knows to count that one, and not another one. Or they can request a "provisional", "test", or "decoy" token, which can be used to cast a ballot that will never be counted. Anyone that attempts to coerce a voter into voting a particular way, or who tries to pay for votes, can be given a genuine token that is later cancelled, or a dummy token that was never valid to begin with. They have no means of validating if the token represents a vote that counts until after the election is over. At that time, an audit or recount might show that it was a decoy vote. You can't work backwards from a ballot to see who cast it. You can't work backwards from a public voter registration to see how they voted in any election. You can only start from the set of tokens, verify that one belongs to a registered voter, verify that it was used to cast a ballot, and if you also have privileged access to the voter registration system, determine whether or not that token is the single authoritative voting token for that voter in the current election. In a recount or audit, the voter registration authority consults its database, finds all the tokens valid for a given election, computes the ballot hashes for each, and prints out all the ballot hashes, including machine-readable barcodes. A sorting machine could be loaded with the list, and automatically spit out a pile of ballots to be counted, and a pile of ballots that don't count. Or a human could sort them by hand, by consulting the list of valid ballot hashes, and crossing out the one printed on the ballot they are looking at. Any ballot not on the list, or already crossed off of it, goes in the "don't count" pile. Then, once again, by machine or by human, the ballots in the "valid" pile can be independently counted for the office or issue in question, and compared against the original automated count. The secret part of this voting system is the secret kept between the voter and the government with respect to "does this specific ballot count or not?".
• Frondo 8y ago
  This is already a theoretical risk with vote-by-mail systems, and in practice it is Not a Problem. Oregon has had vote-by-mail for more than two decades; there are present-day voters who were born after Oregon dropped polling places entirely. Vote coercion is not a concern, after 20 years of practical experience with the system. Neither is voter fraud (something like 54 fraudulent ballots cast, out of 2+ million, in 2016; the vast majority of those were people voting in Oregon and in another state.) The benefit, however, comes in the form of increased turnout; no need to rush to a polling place on a day that's very likely not a holiday for you. I wish everyone would switch to vote-by-mail the way Oregon does it.
• _tb1_ 8y ago
  But people can always take a photo, it's illegal, but so is buying votes.