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I do need this. How can I ever check if my vote was counted by paper ballots? It seems like blockchain would allow everyone to be able to check that their vot

I do need this. How can I ever check if my vote was counted by paper ballots? It seems like blockchain would allow everyone to be able to check that their vote counted, in an anonymous yet totally transparent and verifiable way.

newaccoutnas 7y ago
To a degree you have to put your trust in the system and build enough checks in so that no one part of it can be corrupted. The issue with electronic voting is that it's easy to scale attacks.
jrumbut 7y ago
Their backend is printing out PDFs for the county election workers to count. You still have to trust someone, you'll always have to trust someone.
- shawnz 7y ago
  You could count the results yourself to double check the outcome with a blockchain-based solution
  - InitialLastName 7y ago
    With a paper-based solution, you (or your organization) can also count the votes yourself. With the added advantage that it's harder to manipulate, less prone to failure, and easier for non-technical people to understand.
    - shawnz 7y ago
      Multiple people can't get access to the paper documents at the same time. And when they do get access there's no guarantee that they are getting the actual papers that citizens submitted. Even if you got citizens to individually sign each one with their private key and write the signature on the paper, you still couldn't prove that votes weren't removed
      - InitialLastName 7y ago
        You're right, which is why the paper solution is accompanied by a process of handling involving all of the interested parties. If you want to, you can go to the polling place and observe the box with the ballots all the way through to counting and registering the totals.
        shawnz 7y ago
        It doesn't involve all the interested parties and there's no way it could. That's what I'm trying to say. Maybe it's feasible for one watchdog organization to audit one polling station using your method. But it's not possible for every citizen to independently audit every polling station across the country, like you would be able to with the blockchain approach.
michaelbuckbee 7y ago
Agreed, honestly out of all the different potential blockchain uses this particular solution has always struck me as having the most potential.
83457 7y ago
Are you suggesting a way to verify your vote was counted correctly is needed? Wouldn't that provide the ability for folks to sell their vote by being able to show someone else?
- dfxm12 7y ago
  No, you already have the ability to sell your vote.
  - rounce 7y ago
    But not the means to prove you’ve held up your end of the deal.
  - MichaelApproved 7y ago
    Without proof that you voted a certain way, people are unlikely to pay you. That's why some states don't allow you to take a picture of a ballot that you filled out. They're trying to prevent you from confirming that you voted a certain way.
    - criddell 7y ago
      First, why shouldn't I be allowed to sell or trade my vote? Secondly, there are states where you can vote by mail. Do you know if vote selling is a big problem in those states?
      - Frondo 7y ago
        I lived in Oregon--which has had exclusively vote by mail for decades--for a while and never heard anyone bring up vote selling as a risk to election integrity. No one (journalists, legislators, etc) ever claimed it was happening. The state republican party still makes occasional claims of voter fraud, but those are exceedingly rare -- something like 54 ballots out of 4 million in the 2016 election cycle -- and they mostly come down to people voting in Oregon and in another state at the same time. The only reported case of election fraud I can remember was in 2016 and done by a republican, in which she tossed out a bunch of democratic voter ballots. That's it. For two decades of elections, Oregon hasn't had a problem with election integrity. They do, however, have a consistently high turnout, which they attribute to vote-by-mail.
jedimastert 7y ago
> How can I ever check if my vote was counted by paper ballots? You can watch if you want, or even be a part of the counting. IIRC most paper ballot schemes have the counting be public in some form or another, so that opposing factions can call each other out if someone is cheating in some way.
specialist 7y ago
Using a blockchain cannot (ever) tell you if your vote was counted. Blockchains for election administration are a digital form of physical chain of custody. Like when you move boxes between locations. You're thinking of crypto voting schemes. None of which have proven feasible in the wild. The Australian ballot form of election administration means private voting, public counting. For example, dropping your ballot into a box at a poll site. Any process enabling any kind of post mortem verification is more akin to accounting, eg open ledger with credits and debts. That's the opposite of a secret ballot.
- uasm 7y ago
  > "Using a blockchain cannot (ever) tell you if your vote was counted." What. By voting you commit a change to the blockchain. The system should report back your "commit hash". Said hash is public (as is the entire blockchain), guaranteed to be unique, and counts towards the overall balance. In contrast - a paper ballot can disappear. Your vote can be manipulated. All without any trace.
  - newaccoutnas 7y ago
    Not in the system they used, it was private. As has been noted elsewhere, it would be trivial to have the majority of peers could be under nefarious control
    - hanniabu 7y ago
      That's a failure of their implementation. That doesn't discount every implementation. I feel too many here are too quick to dismiss alternative.
  - specialist 7y ago
    It's hard to directly compare the attack surface area of various systems. And yes, ballots have been disappeared, injected, etc. One of the prerequisites of Australian ballot election administration is having sufficient observers. But the same is true of any "trustworthy" process. Having studied this stuff for over a decade (now inactive), I believe, but cannot definitively prove that paper ballots cast at poll sites is the most robust against attack. FWIW, the election integrity community concurs. Security research and knowledge has progressed a lot in the last decade. It'd probably be worthwhile to circle back and apply the state of the art to this domain. (Alas, saving democracy doesn't pay very well, so it's unlikely that it'll be me doing the work this time around.)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pjmorris 7y ago
Counting in public is the solution. You can attend the count yourself, or you can trust that the loser of the election will have people there to challenge any questionable moves made in the counting process.
IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
Here's my experience in Germany: My polling station is less than 200m away. I have never waited more than two minutes to vote. All voting is with a pen on a paper ballot. Once the precinct closes, you are allowed to stay and observe the counting. Because each polling place serves only a couple hundred voters, it is easy to follow the counting. As long as it is possible to do so without interfering, everyone can observe so closely they can read the actual ballots and verify that they are sorted into the correct piles. You can then watch the counting of those piles close enough to verify the count. Later, you can go online and look up the row for your precinct in a spreadsheet. This is end-to-end verifiability, and it is neither expensive nor unable to scale: A national election in Germany will see about 40 million voters. What's most important: Unlike blockchain or any other online voting scheme, the whole process is easily understandable by everyone. In times were every institution is suspected to be corrupt, being merely safe is not enough. It needs to be safe in a way that does not rely on experts in cryptography to say so. I have seen only one valid objection to using this process in the US: It is far more common there to have elections with dozens of individual races and ballot issues. Germany usually has just two individual questions to be voted on, and maybe five when local and national races fall on the same day. Considering this, it would still be possible to use the process for the top X races on a given election day.
wittrock 7y ago
A number of end-to-end verifiable voting systems have been proposed and fielded! See [0]. The key issue they try to solve is how to let you check your vote was counted without being able to prove who you voted for to anyone else, thus preventing coercion attacks. Most of them rely on paper, but some [1], provide reasonable guarantees about online voting. None of it involves blockchain. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity [1]: https://heliosvoting.org/ https://heliosvoting.org/
widforss 7y ago
I was actually able to verify that my vote was counted in the last European Parliament election. I voted for an obscure candidate from an obscure party, and my vote sure shows up on https://data.val.se/val/ep2019/slutresultat/E/rike/index.html https://data.val.se/val/ep2019/slutresultat/E/rike/index.htm...

newaccoutnas 7y ago

To a degree you have to put your trust in the system and build enough checks in so that no one part of it can be corrupted. The issue with electronic voting is that it's easy to scale attacks.

jrumbut 7y ago

Their backend is printing out PDFs for the county election workers to count. You still have to trust someone, you'll always have to trust someone.

shawnz 7y ago
You could count the results yourself to double check the outcome with a blockchain-based solution
- InitialLastName 7y ago
  With a paper-based solution, you (or your organization) can also count the votes yourself. With the added advantage that it's harder to manipulate, less prone to failure, and easier for non-technical people to understand.
  - shawnz 7y ago
    Multiple people can't get access to the paper documents at the same time. And when they do get access there's no guarantee that they are getting the actual papers that citizens submitted. Even if you got citizens to individually sign each one with their private key and write the signature on the paper, you still couldn't prove that votes weren't removed
    - InitialLastName 7y ago
      You're right, which is why the paper solution is accompanied by a process of handling involving all of the interested parties. If you want to, you can go to the polling place and observe the box with the ballots all the way through to counting and registering the totals.
      - shawnz 7y ago
        It doesn't involve all the interested parties and there's no way it could. That's what I'm trying to say. Maybe it's feasible for one watchdog organization to audit one polling station using your method. But it's not possible for every citizen to independently audit every polling station across the country, like you would be able to with the blockchain approach.

michaelbuckbee 7y ago

Agreed, honestly out of all the different potential blockchain uses this particular solution has always struck me as having the most potential.

83457 7y ago

Are you suggesting a way to verify your vote was counted correctly is needed? Wouldn't that provide the ability for folks to sell their vote by being able to show someone else?

dfxm12 7y ago
No, you already have the ability to sell your vote.
- rounce 7y ago
  But not the means to prove you’ve held up your end of the deal.
- MichaelApproved 7y ago
  Without proof that you voted a certain way, people are unlikely to pay you. That's why some states don't allow you to take a picture of a ballot that you filled out. They're trying to prevent you from confirming that you voted a certain way.
  - criddell 7y ago
    First, why shouldn't I be allowed to sell or trade my vote? Secondly, there are states where you can vote by mail. Do you know if vote selling is a big problem in those states?
    - Frondo 7y ago
      I lived in Oregon--which has had exclusively vote by mail for decades--for a while and never heard anyone bring up vote selling as a risk to election integrity. No one (journalists, legislators, etc) ever claimed it was happening. The state republican party still makes occasional claims of voter fraud, but those are exceedingly rare -- something like 54 ballots out of 4 million in the 2016 election cycle -- and they mostly come down to people voting in Oregon and in another state at the same time. The only reported case of election fraud I can remember was in 2016 and done by a republican, in which she tossed out a bunch of democratic voter ballots. That's it. For two decades of elections, Oregon hasn't had a problem with election integrity. They do, however, have a consistently high turnout, which they attribute to vote-by-mail.

jedimastert 7y ago

> How can I ever check if my vote was counted by paper ballots? You can watch if you want, or even be a part of the counting. IIRC most paper ballot schemes have the counting be public in some form or another, so that opposing factions can call each other out if someone is cheating in some way.

specialist 7y ago

Using a blockchain cannot (ever) tell you if your vote was counted. Blockchains for election administration are a digital form of physical chain of custody. Like when you move boxes between locations. You're thinking of crypto voting schemes. None of which have proven feasible in the wild. The Australian ballot form of election administration means private voting, public counting. For example, dropping your ballot into a box at a poll site. Any process enabling any kind of post mortem verification is more akin to accounting, eg open ledger with credits and debts. That's the opposite of a secret ballot.

uasm 7y ago
> "Using a blockchain cannot (ever) tell you if your vote was counted." What. By voting you commit a change to the blockchain. The system should report back your "commit hash". Said hash is public (as is the entire blockchain), guaranteed to be unique, and counts towards the overall balance. In contrast - a paper ballot can disappear. Your vote can be manipulated. All without any trace.
- newaccoutnas 7y ago
  Not in the system they used, it was private. As has been noted elsewhere, it would be trivial to have the majority of peers could be under nefarious control
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    That's a failure of their implementation. That doesn't discount every implementation. I feel too many here are too quick to dismiss alternative.
- specialist 7y ago
  It's hard to directly compare the attack surface area of various systems. And yes, ballots have been disappeared, injected, etc. One of the prerequisites of Australian ballot election administration is having sufficient observers. But the same is true of any "trustworthy" process. Having studied this stuff for over a decade (now inactive), I believe, but cannot definitively prove that paper ballots cast at poll sites is the most robust against attack. FWIW, the election integrity community concurs. Security research and knowledge has progressed a lot in the last decade. It'd probably be worthwhile to circle back and apply the state of the art to this domain. (Alas, saving democracy doesn't pay very well, so it's unlikely that it'll be me doing the work this time around.)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

pjmorris 7y ago

Counting in public is the solution. You can attend the count yourself, or you can trust that the loser of the election will have people there to challenge any questionable moves made in the counting process.

IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago

Here's my experience in Germany: My polling station is less than 200m away. I have never waited more than two minutes to vote. All voting is with a pen on a paper ballot. Once the precinct closes, you are allowed to stay and observe the counting. Because each polling place serves only a couple hundred voters, it is easy to follow the counting. As long as it is possible to do so without interfering, everyone can observe so closely they can read the actual ballots and verify that they are sorted into the correct piles. You can then watch the counting of those piles close enough to verify the count. Later, you can go online and look up the row for your precinct in a spreadsheet. This is end-to-end verifiability, and it is neither expensive nor unable to scale: A national election in Germany will see about 40 million voters. What's most important: Unlike blockchain or any other online voting scheme, the whole process is easily understandable by everyone. In times were every institution is suspected to be corrupt, being merely safe is not enough. It needs to be safe in a way that does not rely on experts in cryptography to say so. I have seen only one valid objection to using this process in the US: It is far more common there to have elections with dozens of individual races and ballot issues. Germany usually has just two individual questions to be voted on, and maybe five when local and national races fall on the same day. Considering this, it would still be possible to use the process for the top X races on a given election day.

wittrock 7y ago

A number of end-to-end verifiable voting systems have been proposed and fielded! See [0]. The key issue they try to solve is how to let you check your vote was counted without being able to prove who you voted for to anyone else, thus preventing coercion attacks. Most of them rely on paper, but some [1], provide reasonable guarantees about online voting. None of it involves blockchain. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity [1]: https://heliosvoting.org/ https://heliosvoting.org/

widforss 7y ago

I was actually able to verify that my vote was counted in the last European Parliament election. I voted for an obscure candidate from an obscure party, and my vote sure shows up on https://data.val.se/val/ep2019/slutresultat/E/rike/index.html https://data.val.se/val/ep2019/slutresultat/E/rike/index.htm...