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USPS Files Patent for a Blockchain-Based Voting System

299 points by seigando 6y ago

foepys 6y ago
All blockchain (and electronic for that matter) voting systems are inherently bad because they are not easy to verify. Nothing beats pen and paper in verifiability and ease of use. If done right with many eyes on the ballots, manipulation requires thousands of co-conspirators. The only downside is the slow speed.
- another-dave 6y ago
  Some people also argue that the pen and paper method, by not being instant, drive some extra engagement in the political process, so could be seen as another positive rather than a downside — coverage of vote counting can go on for hours (or days) and it's the one time that democracy is visibly "exciting". This feels like it has a ring of truth to it, but then personally I'm interested in politics so maybe that's a self selection bias — would be interesting if there was a formal study on this.
- colordrops 6y ago
  You give one citizen one vote on the chain. They can personally verify that their vote was counted because the chain is visible. Counts can't be rigged because the entire chain is public. Voters can only vote by going to a physical location where they use a multi-key signature, one by the voter, and one by the local polling station, avoiding people selling off their keys. This is anonymous, traceable, and the vote can't be altered.
  - foepys 6y ago
    How does the average citizen verify what is actually happening and that their vote is actually being counted? That when they vote for X that the counter for X is increasing by 1? By verify I mean full understanding of the process without the need to believe somebody who calls themselves an "expert".
    - sebmellen 6y ago
      This is a tricky UX issue at the moment, but I'm sure this will be doable in time. The nice thing about blockchains is that once transactions are finalized, the state is known, independently of whether or not the user was hacked. With zero-knowledge proofs, voters could theoretically verify that their "right to vote token" (as I've explained in another answer above) was used to cast a certain vote, without revealing their identity. Now, if the software they're using is malicious, or their device is vulnerable, the election is screwed. It's worth noting that Estonia manages digital elections quite nicely with their digital ID cards, which use an underlying blockchain-type system to ensure system integrity
      - foepys 6y ago
        It's not a UX issue, it's a logic issue. Voting has to count each vote exactly once, must be easily (!) verifiable at every step, and must be anonymous. Every blockchain systems violates at least one of those constrains, mostly the verifiable part. Estonia is more or less unimportant on the global scale. There is very little incentive to manipulate an election from the outside.
        sebmellen 6y ago
        Estonia is probably the most vulnerable country to election tampering in Europe aside from Belarus. Their entire internet and e-voting infrastructure was built up after the largest cyber-attack on a foreign nation, which came from Russia after Estonia removed a Soviet-era war memorial. This attack also led to the NATO Cybersecurity Center of Excellence being based in Tallinn, and Estonian firms becoming leaders in cybersecurity consulting worldwide. The Estonian example is a splendid example of decentralization and self-sovereign identity done right. All medical records, civil data, banking information, is stored in a decentralized mesh called X-Road. Finland and other Nordic countries are now adopting X-Road after Estonia's success with it. If you wish to speak more about this, I'd be glad to, but you're wrong on all fronts. I don't want to regurgitate my blockchain arguments, but if you Ctrl-F this thread for "Right to Vote", you will find my contention about how verifiable, anonymous, and single-vote elections can be held on-chain. But don't get me wrong, I'm not a proponent of it. I still thing in-person paper-ballot voting is the most reasonable way to vote. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/data-security-meets-diplomacy-why-estonia-storing-its-data-luxembourg-n1018171 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/data-security-meets-diplo...
  - galkk 6y ago
    As I see, the problem is not that the vote can be altered, but that the vote can be bought and the fact that person voted in the right fashion could be verified by 3-rd party much more easily (screenshots/whatever). The privacy of voting booth could give at least some chance to change mind/lie to the third party.
    - sebmellen 6y ago
      In theory, mail-in voting carries these same problems, and we're about to hold the largest mail-in voting election ever. Not sure this is really an argument against an electronic voting system. In fact, with a blockchain-based system, the vote could be held in "limbo" until the voter decides to cast it, or you could give the option of creating fake screenshots to deter anyone "buying votes". You can't do this with a paper ballot. The real problem is compiler and hardware level.
      - M2Ys4U 6y ago
        >In theory, mail-in voting carries these same problems, and we're about to hold the largest mail-in voting election ever. And the president is - right now - conducting a denial of service attack on it. If that doesn't show that remote voting is vulnerable I don't know what does...
        dragonwriter 6y ago
        The only reason for a big mail-in election is a historic exploit of an availability vulnerability of our in-person voting system, that it depends on lots and lots of (in practice, mostly older) people willing to spend a day in close contact with each other and other people for almost no pay. > And the president is - right now - conducting a denial of service attack on it. Or at least miming one, perhaps to provide political cover for Republican-governed swing state legislatures, seeing the problems of in-person voting in the pandemic and armed with the telegraphed disruption of vote by mail as cover and polling data as motivation, to simply exercise their prerogative to cancel public voting and assign a set of Presidential electors without it, which the Republican control of the Senate can guarantee withstand any challenge in the electoral vote count. If he really wanted electoral chaos by disrupting vote-by-mail, there'd by no reason to telegraph it; the reason to telegraph it is because he desires a response that it either provokes or justifies, as much, more than, or perhaps even instead of the disruption itself.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Scarblac 6y ago
    It's not anonymous enough. If you sell your vote or are coerced, you can show your proof to the buyer.
- cheph 6y ago
  > The only downside is the slow speed. Worth it given how important it is.
Proven 6y ago
FFS. What's next, a crowdsourcing campaign? How about they stop losing money and subsidizing Amazon?
nobodywastaken 6y ago
wow what a politically relevant thing to do. I'm sure this has nothing to do with partisan politics and is purely a technologically interesting development. I will likely dig deeper into this new groundbreaking technology.
sebmellen 6y ago
My whole startup is built on blockchain, and I'm an Estonian e-Resident (Estonia allows their citizens to vote digitally), so I find blockchain voting fascinating. That said, there are some problems with it. This Tom Scott video explains why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs. But this is a very cool idea: combining the USPS vote-by-mail infrastructure with a blockchain layer that sits on top, used mainly to provide anonymous provenance. We'll see if this ever gets implemented, but I think it's a great example of the non-hype uses for blockchains being explored.
- peignoir 6y ago
  Oh cool, not related to the article directly but I m off to Estonia and working on a blockchain (tezos) voting system and community if interested : www.electis.io
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    Interesting. For lower stakes voting, this could be a great implementation. I have good friends building a Tezos startup right now (Tezsure) - certainly an interesting chain! We're on Stellar mainly because of block times. You can see a beta of our timestamping service (mainly built for scientists... launch coming soon) here: https://assembl.app/chronos https://assembl.app/chronos
- amelius 6y ago
  Very nice video, though in the personally delivered sponsored message at the end he seems to be contradicting himself. Why would you still trust a password manager after seeing the video? And wouldn't it be incredibly stupid if an entire nation put their passwords in a vault controlled by some company in possibly another nation?
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    That's a good point. I suppose it's poignant in a way — though we might wish to stop the tide, everything is digitizing. Voting will inevitably be swept up in this process, and it's not a matter of if we should do it or not, but how we do it best. And for what it's worth, password managers are a very good idea (though probably not worth staking an election on). I would however recommend Bitwarden: https://bitwarden.com https://bitwarden.com, which is open-source and well-audited. In cryptography we trust (and we probably will for voting someday soon as well)!
kfrzcode 6y ago
Electronic voting is a terrible idea. Attacks on paper & pen ballot systems are much, much harder to scale. Here's Tom Scott with a great explanation of the basics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
- ianleeclark 6y ago
  > Attacks on paper & pen ballot systems are much, much harder to scale. As it turns out, you can just impose austerity.
- tdons 6y ago
  The same argument applies to the internet at large. Shall we move back to filing cabinets because that makes data leaks more difficult? I'm sure that at some point we'll crack the electronic voting nut. But yeah: it's scary and the stakes are high. Then again, we've fixed electronic banking and that runs pretty nicely without many problems -- right?
  - Swenrekcah 6y ago
    Electronic banking works prescicely because it isn't a secret semi-anonymous blockchain thing. If credit card payments end up in the wrong account, someone notices. If an electronic voting system assigns votes to the wrong candidate, who notices?
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    There are next to no stakes with electronic banking compared to voting. Money is a totally different prospect to rigging an election. The Trump campaign did some extremely shady things with Wikileaks and the GRU, can you imagine if he was now leading the US through COVID after the Russians were able to compromise the voting system? The constitution does not have a mechanism to deal with it, as far as I can see. What's the point when paper works already and is almost impossible to scale. Voting is easy
Exorus18 6y ago
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
nathias 6y ago
We should be experimenting with electronic voting for 30 years and innovate solutions to its problems. Nobody thinks it doesn't have problems, but to just stop at pen and paper voting just means to affirm the problems of pen and paper which are IMO much worse. (scarce voting, batched issues)
- fsh 6y ago
  Most european countries simply don't have any problems with pen and paper voting. Turnout is typically much larger than in the US with its crazy mix of electronic/mail-in/in-person voting. Probably this is due to automatic voter registration for all citizens, having the elections on Sunday or on a holiday, and (in some cases) not having a first-past-the-post system where a large fraction of votes don't matter anyway.
  - nathias 6y ago
    Yes we do, everyone has them. There is an unimaginable difference between a system where you can have a referendum on =X once per year and it costs 10mil or a system where you can have a referendum every second and it costs ~0. We can then vote for issues directly instead of having people that may or may not (as is most often the case) vote in a way they signal they would before elected.
    - mhh__ 6y ago
      Referenda are a terrible way of governing. Think about Brexit - bad faith arguing from one side, constant lying, no plan about how to actually leave, and then a protest vote pushed it last 50% so now we have to leave on a no deal because it's an impossible policy to do in a few years. A referendum is OK for deep constitutional issues, but policy should not be decided by referenda especially vague ones. Policy is also quite hard to undo, a direct voting system would like lead to us living in a rent-controlled, capital punishment-ing, overtaxed reactionary world.
      - sebmellen 6y ago
Galanwe 6y ago
What troubles me with this is that at some point in the system there will need to be a mapping "real identity" -> "ID of voter in the blockchain". What happens the day this mapping leaks?
- foepys 6y ago
  Even if that's solved: what happens when voters lose they key? Or worse: get it stolen from them.
- soulofmischief 6y ago
  Ideally you should be able to produce a unique hash each time you vote, derived from your master key. The server doesn't need to know your private key. This is how crypto works now, generating unique and theoretically unlinkable wallet addresses from a secret key.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  In theory, this on-chain voter ID would never have to be "mapped" directly to a voter. Rather, IDs are simply private-public keypair accounts, and all that's provisioned by the holders of the election is the right to vote with one account. Then, the vote is cast by redeeming this right to vote token, without the voting account ever being linked to a "real identity". Of course, there are problems here too. Mainly with UX, and then at a low level the hardware used (the general public is very easy to hack if you have nation-state power).
  - marzell 6y ago
    How does this compare with Estonia and their use of public ID numbers? I just know they don't consider their ID numbers secret the way SSNs are in the US, yet they use them for everything. How do they prevent fraud and ID theft?
    - sebmellen 6y ago
      In Estonia, a user has a digital ID card, which contains a secure chip. Neither they or their computers can ever read the private keys contained in this chip. The card is minted like a passport or driver's license, so it's basically impossible to get a card for someone you aren't. The voting system works similarly to this "right to vote" token model in the backend, from what I know of it. The only difference is that the ID card is where the sensitive data is statically encoded (not on a theoretically hackable computer). They did have some cryptography problems a while back though. The government says it was not too big of a deal because they caught the bug, and would never have held an election with the bug still present. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/estonia-advanced-digital-society-here-s-how-that-helped-it-during-covid-19/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/estonia-advanced-digi... https://www.reuters.com/article/estonia-gemalto/estonia-sues-gemalto-for-152-mln-euros-over-id-card-flaws-idUSL8N1WD5JZ https://www.reuters.com/article/estonia-gemalto/estonia-sues...
barbegal 6y ago
You could easily replace the word Blockchain in this patent application with the word database and it would all still make sense. Blockchains (I prefer to call them Merkle trees) were invented 40 years ago. The interesting part about cryptocurrency based Blockchains that makes them unforgeable is that they contain proof of work. The work to create an entire Blockchain is equal to the sum of the work contained in each node. Without proof of work Blockchains are easily forgeable.
- DarthGhandi 6y ago
  How do you prove the database hasn't been tampered with?
  - barbegal 6y ago
    You can't but how can you prove the blockchain hasn't been tampered with?
    - flixic 6y ago
      Proof of Work, chain of blocks.
    - koheripbal 6y ago
      If you are asking, then you don't understand how the blockchain works. It's literally the entire point of the chain.
      - RunawayGalaxy 6y ago
        Prove that your blockchain hasn't been compromised by a sophisticated 51% attack.
        RealityVoid 6y ago
        You can't. A 51% attack is literally "the network". And I wouldn't call a 51% attack sophisticated, really. It's just having a bigger hammer than the other guy.
pgt 6y ago
Maybe this is a dumb idea, but what if for each election we issued a ballot containing a unique, random, sequential prime number to every registered voter? Then, when counting the votes for each candidate we display the running product of all the primes counted for that candidate as a "checksum", or "check product". This retains privacy while allowing individual voters to easily verify that their vote was counted by simply dividing their party's checksum by their prime ballot number and confirming that it is a factor of the check product. By displaying a running product of votes, you can also verify that your vote was not counted before you voted. Additionally, this prevents double counting because the "checksum" for N primes must match exactly N votes and no two candidates can share a factor. By issuing sequences of primes to certain regions, you can get some metrics by state. Then you institute a rule that if some % of primes dispute that theirs was counted correctly, a recount is automatically triggered.
- luckylion 6y ago
  It allows for verification not only by the voter but also by third parties, doesn't it? That would make it possibly to sell votes (with proof!) or threaten people with repercussions unless they vote a certain way.
  - compsciphd 6y ago
    what's a bigger threat. "selling votes" or unverifiable election. i.e. we generally say election fraud is not a huge problem because its too easy to get caught. if that's the case, one would think any vote buying scheme would be even easier to get caught.
    - Ekaros 6y ago
      Or coercion. If at any point your vote can be known, there is very high risk that someone forces you to vote like they want. Only way to prevent this is total anonymity of which vote was by which person.
      - compsciphd 6y ago
Yetanfou 6y ago
Did they also invent a system which protects against voter coercion? If they did not, they might as well stop now since no matter how secure the voting system is its relevance falls down to zero if it is possible for the local gang leader to coerce voters to vote for 'his' candidate - "my man stands behind you to watch you vote for candidate X, if you so much as twitch your little girl gets whipped" (which works but doesn't scale that well) or "you show me proof of you voting for candidate X or we'll burn down your house" (which scales but depends on vote verifiability and as such is rather easily foiled).
- sebmellen 6y ago
  This is a ridiculous argument, because it could just as well apply to mail-in voting as blockchain-based voting. I also think this fear is far overstated (do we have any stories of this happening in the US?) and the more pernicious forms of voter suppression and misinformation are downplayed. If blockchain systems allow 90% of the populace to vote unencumbered, with a 5% inaccuracy rate (which is far higher than to be expected), that's still more democratic than only 70% voting. EDIT: There are also ways to guard against voter coercion, for example by allowing "fake votes" to be cast, which if not cast with a certain memo in the transaction, will not be counted. This memo can be a PIN that the user is given as their "legitimate vote PIN", without which the vote would be invalid. When the user wants to appease their "mob boss", they would simply vote with another pin, and the vote would show as having gone through. This is a surface-level solution, but the technical architecture that can be built to avoid voter coercion in a digital system is far greater than that with mail-in voting. With mail-in voting, your "mob boss" just forces you to tick a box, and put the sealed ballot in the nearest USPS drop box.
  - donaltroddyn 6y ago
    It's certainly not a ridiculous argument. Anonymity is a cornerstone of fair voting systems, and any system that allows votes to be deanonymised increases the risk of coercion. The same type of risk applies to postal voting, although with less severity, as with postal voting there is only one opportunity to check the coerced vote. Blockchain based votes can be checked after the fact. Still, for this reason, postal voting is rare, and most countries that allow it do so only for citizens living abroad or who cannot travel to a polling station die to injury or illness. Countries like the UK and Australia that allow any eligible voter to do so by mail are rare.
todaysAI 6y ago
Maybe they should maintain the postal boxes, have enough sorting machines, maintain the necessary manpower/processes, and remain independent enough to deliver the fucking mail.
- ben509 6y ago
  Even if they did all that, all the states would need reliable mailing lists. Oregon and Washington have been rigorously checking their lists precisely because of this problem, while other states don't need to do that if the onus is on the voter to show up at the correct poll. It turns out that 17% of Nevada primary ballots had the wrong address. If over 10% of votes are mailed to the wrong address, it would be a major crisis in a hotly contested election. [1]: https://publicinterestlegal.org/files/NV-2020-Primary-1P-1.pdf https://publicinterestlegal.org/files/NV-2020-Primary-1P-1.p...
aoowii 6y ago
Am I the only one still against network-based, and to a lesser extent electronic-based, voting? It's near impossible to rig or suppress a physical election without a lot of effort, but one person can DDoS an entire network and no one can vote and the whole election needs to be scrapped. Not even the strongest cryptographic or software systems are free from exploits (especially over time) and there's no way to be sure the open source code for the system is the same code actually being served on the system. A lot of software has died by its own hubris by assuming their systems are secure and then a single 17 year old on 4chan finds a bug and ruins it all. You can't afford for that to happen in an election. Forget hackers, some skilled social engineering gets you the votes of thousands, but you cannot do that in person so easily. I'm sure the problems have been discussed extensively but other niche problems include lack of availability for rural areas (which has been a huge problem even with paper voting). I think the only reliable voting system at scale is in person.
- plankers 6y ago
  You're not the only one. https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
  - doublesCs 6y ago
    > Our entire field is bad at what we do. Our entire field is bad at what we do, because it's full of coders instead of engineers. Think about it. Building airplanes reliably has been figured out by aircraft engineers, building elevators safely has been figured out by building engineers, and building software reliably has been figured out by software _engineers_ (the NASA kind, who landed a spacecraft on the moon). However, this isn't the experience you have on your regular job. "Oh, oops, everything failed because I forgot to do X". Can you imagine if the moon lander crashed because some guy forgot to do that manual thing he's always supposed to do? Of course you can't imagine, because they put actual engineers in charge of that, not coders.
    - ForHackernews 6y ago
      > building software reliably has been figured out by software _engineers_ This is patently untrue when it comes to security. OpenBSD is the closest thing I'm aware of to a "secure" widely used system, and I'm sure that OpenBSD machines are compromised every day. The day that a network exploit is treated with the same seriousness as a commercial jetliner crash is the day I'll believe software security has grown up.
Ekaros 6y ago
What is wrong with in-person paper-ballots? They have worked for centuries. And continue to be the absolute best system from multiple criteria.
- diffeomorphism 6y ago
  Covid? Waiting in long lines? Not having votes on a holiday like in civilized countries?
  - Swenrekcah 6y ago
    All of those are solvable (and solved in most western countries). Re. Covid, it would be a simple solution to spread in person voting out a few days. It would be an inconvenience but no need to invent a new system.
    - TheHypnotist 6y ago
      You overestimate the current government of the USA.
      - Fjolsvith 6y ago
        The federal government doesn't handle vote tallying or polling, so why your comment?
        mhh__ 6y ago
        The federal government also doesn't set the drinking age. The Trump administration seems to be trying to ratfuck an entire election. They won't succeed, but "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest"-style comments from trump about fraud and months of delays in the results are beyond asinine. I'm slightly amazed that HN seems to have a contingent of I'm alright jack supporters of him. Maybe that says something about our ethics but I won't go there.
    - Touche 6y ago
brainzap 6y ago
It will all run on servers, where I am the administrator.
devin 6y ago
For those commenting, I suggest looking into ElectionGuard.
shrubble 6y ago
I never understood why voting remains such an issue. Why not have the credit card companies handle voting? The cost of a card with the chip is less than $2 isn't it? The card is swiped into a reader, the ballot is displayed on screen, choices are made and confirmed, a laser printer prints out a paper ballot which is dropped into a secure box. We would know within 1 hour of polls closing the accurate tally of every race.
- violetyellow 6y ago
  Suppose I'm a bad guy with Trump, I command the credit card company to issue 1 million fake cards with names which are passed away in last century. Ask my agents to sweep these cards and vote for me. How could you civilians prevent these things from happening?
  - diebeforei485 6y ago
    Vote by mail is also vulnerable to this.
  - shrubble 6y ago
    Voter rolls are maintained by the separate states.
naveen99 6y ago
anonymous, verifiable: chose one. I would chose verifiable.
- halfFact 6y ago
  I'm with you. If someone votes for someone, they should also be held accountable for their Politicians actions.
naveen99 6y ago
Regarding sale of verifiable votes. Why not regulate the sale and tax it ?
nhumrich 6y ago
Why does a government service provider need to file a patent?
- Fjolsvith 6y ago
  To prevent another entity from hoarding the solution?
jachell 6y ago
I thought we made it past the era of every company having a blockchain patent.
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
Blockchain is important, but perhaps equally as important is the ability for every user of the system to be able to audit every other user, that is, vote/voter exact information transparency...
lixtra 6y ago
The caltech voting project has a nice collection if papers about electronic voting: http://www.vote.caltech.edu/ http://www.vote.caltech.edu/
60secz 6y ago
Majority vote in a block chain isn't an election -- it's a 51% attack. Without a consistent economic incentive, too cheap for bad actors to act badly.
deleted 6y ago
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MrXOR 6y ago
For peoples looking for the truth about blockchain voting: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/PSNR20.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/PSNR20.pdf
atlgator 6y ago
It's the illusion of safety. There is no facility for identity verification baked into blockchain. You have integrity for the data allowed on the chain but if you let Russian hackers write to it, it undermines the whole thing. Personally I'd rather go with a PKI system that offers non-repudiation.
- propogandist 6y ago
  what Russian hackers?
  - zacharycohn 6y ago
    Apt username for a comment like this.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    Russians are to active measures what God is to sin.
- brundolf 6y ago
  Exactly. This is the entire problem with blockchain: it has absolutely nothing to say about the quality of the data entering the system, which is usually the hard part anyway. But it provides this false sense of security because most people have no idea what it actually means. It's only useful when the entire problem space lives inside the blockchain. As soon as it has to reflect something in the real world, all bets are off.
  - the_snooze 6y ago
    It's pretty much par for the course for blockchain bullshit. They promise the world but aren't honest about the limitations of the tech. Yeah, you get data integrity assurance within the blockchain, but that says nothing about the accuracy of that data as it's coming in.
giancarlostoro 6y ago
There's already a few cryptotokens that allow voting on maintenance of said cryptotokens (or affiliated ones) would these not invalidate such a patent? Edit: On another side, what if we did use Blockchain to supplement votes in a different approach. I have not yet looked at how other Cryptotokens handle voting on policies but say we distribute to each state enough tokens per their legal citizen population, and voting places use a single token per voter, maybe a code is attached to their ballot (maybe a district code, only identifying their region?), this in turn pushes the vote into the blockchain for a permanent record, then when all the manual / machine counting is done we compare the blockchain results to see who screwed up, but it would also allow for a slightly more live view of voting in real-time.
diebeforei485 6y ago
If you were creating a society on Mars, would you use a system of people lining up in-person to vote? Probably not. Rigged elections have been a thing for a very long time. The shenanigans in Belarus is only the latest example. Covid-19 will accelerate the inevitable. We're having a mail-in election this year, people will get comfortable voting from home and it's only a matter of time before people start asking why they can't just do it on their phone. I'm excited for blockchain voting.
- unnouinceput 6y ago
  Wait until people realize there is no need for intermediate people in a lot of areas that can be eliminated with direct voting. Then you'll see a lot of social distress. Current rioting is nothing compared with what's coming
- arp242 6y ago
  The vote in Belarus was rigged by the government: "Lukashenko controls vote counting, [and abused] a vast security apparatus and a noisy state media machine unwavering in its support for him and contempt for his rivals". In other words: it required a vast conspiracy with many people cooperating in various ways to pull off. We've seen the same with rigged elections in Russia and some other places. Compare this to an electronic system where a very small group of people (possibly even just one person) can potentially significantly skew the election results.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Using the Belarus elections as an example here (government meddling) is like saying Litvinenko put the Po is his own tea
mgualt 6y ago
Was this patent filed before or after the head of USPS was installed by the Dear Leader?
- jacques_chester 6y ago
  Patents take several years to be granted. This is an application, it was filed February 7, 2020.
deleted 6y ago
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ddingus 6y ago
So, we are making all the votes a matter of public record? It's either do that, or the voter is forced to blind trust whatever system is used to record their voter intent. To consider this problem properly, think about the problem a blind voter has with a ballot. They cannot see the record of their vote, when it's made by a mark. With a punch card, they cannot see the candidate associated with their record either. They have to trust whoever helps them cast their vote actually does cast it correctly. There is no chain of trust between voter intent and the record of vote cast. Now, in the context of electronic voting, a person touches a screen gives an audio input, whatever. They have to trust the system does what they intend. There is no meaningful verification due to the fact that the system could tell them anything. When a vote is cast on media with a mark, and that mark and media are used for the final tally, the voter knows their intent was recorded, and that intent could be used directly to determine the outcome of the election. (other corruption can happen, and is outside the scope of this comment) Without a public vote record, voters have no idea whether they can trust the election. Blockchain does not help with this problem, unless it's a public affair, everyone sees how everyone else voted. Banking gets around this by always having redundancies. Books are kept in many locations and all must and can be reconciled. Voting has no such redundancy, and due to that, electronic input has a basic trust problem not being discussed enough in my opinion.
- ihm 6y ago
  You can us zero knowledge proofs plus a blockchain to anonymize votes.
  - dQw4w9WgXcQ 6y ago
    This seems to be the tech underneath Algorand. If the USPS created a "Vote Token" and it was truly anonymized, how would a central entity ensure that people were not double-voting etc?
    - ddingus 6y ago
      Exactly.
  - 6y ago
graiz 6y ago
A distributed ledger approach is a very bad idea because a foreign country can launch a 51% attack on the ledger and has the resources to win and thus modify the ledger.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  You can have a blockchain without a distributed ledger.
anigbrowl 6y ago
If you already have working electronic voting (for the sake of argument) you don't need to elect representatives any more, you can just vote on issues directly and set quorums and thresholds. For that matter you don't really need ballots any more either, you can have the corpus of laws as a wiki and just edit it.
davidajackson 6y ago
Isn't the bigger issue here that someone can file a patent for something so blatantly obvious? Patents in software seem to do nothing good for innovation.
OliverGilan 6y ago
A lot of issues being brought up with electronic voting seem to me to be solvable via a blockchain technology like Ethereum. > Even if the code is open source you cannot know that's the software running on the polling machine. If the entire election happened on an Ethereum smart contract and every voter was given an address to vote with they could verify that their transaction cast a vote to the correct smart contract address and they could know what function was called so they would know how it would behave. You wouldn't have to blindly trust the system because you could verify that your vote went where it was supposed to go. > Social engineering/hacking an online voting pool This is definitely still possible. Any smart contract to handle this would need to be rigorously audited to make sure there are no vulnerabilities. As for social engineering, I do not think this is that big of a deal as long as you emphasize the importance of never sharing your private key. I also do not think it's all or nothing. You could potentially have electronic voting built on blockchain technology but still have it all done in normal polling booths like we do now. The benefit to this is that you have the reliability of in-person polling but the citizen can then also track their vote to add a second layer of verification. Idk, what am I missing that makes this obviously a bad idea?
- throwaway936482 6y ago
  Because it's utterly utterly unnecessary and can be solved by the very simple tick box, count ballot in public, let anyone watch or volunteer to do so system. The existing problems with the American system of dodgy ballots, hanging chads, OCR errors etc. are causes by too much technology. Get rid of it all and use a wholly manual system. Treat postal votes the same way and count them at the same time as other ballots.
arkanciscan 6y ago
See, this is why I'm voting for Trump; whether he means to or not, he breaks shit, and that's what I think has to happen for progress to occur. Joe is status quo. I want an omelette, not a bunch of eggs.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  That should be biden's campaign ad. Just have that read out over some photos of people who've died of COVID. Sure he's undermining American democracy, and openly defending white supremacists (white power anyone) but he breaks shit!
  - arkanciscan 6y ago
    We need two countries. One for people who just want things to stay the same because they are scared, and one for people who want things to be better.
solarkraft 6y ago
Tom Scott: Why electronic voting is still a bad idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
brundolf 6y ago
There's an XKCD for this: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
guenthert 6y ago
Does that mean they can now further de-prioritize mail delivery? I'm waiting for weeks on my EDD debit card. If only someone would have invented a way to transfer funds electronically ...
zelly 6y ago
- Won't work. People will lose their private keys. Apparently the key is distributed to people on a piece of paper in the mail. That will get stolen--or claimed to be stolen. It will be a mess. - What's the point of a blockchain here? Is USPS raising money with an ICO? The use of digital signatures is enough. By having a "distributed public ledger" now you open the possibility of getting Sybil attacked. But wait, you say, USPS has their own canoncial version of the chain that they can force everyone to rollback to in case of an attack--then what was the point of a blockchain? You could just have a website that shows a list of public keys and who they voted for. It would be totally auditable by anyone, just as a blockchain would be, without any of the security risks of a blockchain.
throwawaysea 6y ago
How is this at all patentable? Can someone explain the line between new innovation and application of existing technology?
ycombonator 6y ago
I received two separate ballots on two different people who resided in this house in the past. What’s stopping me from filling both these ballots and mailing them. The point is unless and until the voter roll integrity is guaranteed there is always a possibility of fraud.
yalogin 6y ago
Why does the USPS have a group that thinks about blockchain? If it exists what is this group ?
- detaro 6y ago
  lots of enterprise-y companies and organizations get small groups to look at buzzword topics, and blockchain has been hyped for a bunch of postal-adjacent topics. Good chunk of the patent authors seem to be external consultants too... Couldn't find anything specific about in what context USPS specifically looked at that.

299 points by seigando 6y ago

All blockchain (and electronic for that matter) voting systems are inherently bad because they are not easy to verify. Nothing beats pen and paper in verifiability and ease of use. If done right with many eyes on the ballots, manipulation requires thousands of co-conspirators. The only downside is the slow speed.

another-dave 6y ago
Some people also argue that the pen and paper method, by not being instant, drive some extra engagement in the political process, so could be seen as another positive rather than a downside — coverage of vote counting can go on for hours (or days) and it's the one time that democracy is visibly "exciting". This feels like it has a ring of truth to it, but then personally I'm interested in politics so maybe that's a self selection bias — would be interesting if there was a formal study on this.
colordrops 6y ago
You give one citizen one vote on the chain. They can personally verify that their vote was counted because the chain is visible. Counts can't be rigged because the entire chain is public. Voters can only vote by going to a physical location where they use a multi-key signature, one by the voter, and one by the local polling station, avoiding people selling off their keys. This is anonymous, traceable, and the vote can't be altered.
- foepys 6y ago
  How does the average citizen verify what is actually happening and that their vote is actually being counted? That when they vote for X that the counter for X is increasing by 1? By verify I mean full understanding of the process without the need to believe somebody who calls themselves an "expert".
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    This is a tricky UX issue at the moment, but I'm sure this will be doable in time. The nice thing about blockchains is that once transactions are finalized, the state is known, independently of whether or not the user was hacked. With zero-knowledge proofs, voters could theoretically verify that their "right to vote token" (as I've explained in another answer above) was used to cast a certain vote, without revealing their identity. Now, if the software they're using is malicious, or their device is vulnerable, the election is screwed. It's worth noting that Estonia manages digital elections quite nicely with their digital ID cards, which use an underlying blockchain-type system to ensure system integrity
    - foepys 6y ago
      It's not a UX issue, it's a logic issue. Voting has to count each vote exactly once, must be easily (!) verifiable at every step, and must be anonymous. Every blockchain systems violates at least one of those constrains, mostly the verifiable part. Estonia is more or less unimportant on the global scale. There is very little incentive to manipulate an election from the outside.
      - sebmellen 6y ago
        Estonia is probably the most vulnerable country to election tampering in Europe aside from Belarus. Their entire internet and e-voting infrastructure was built up after the largest cyber-attack on a foreign nation, which came from Russia after Estonia removed a Soviet-era war memorial. This attack also led to the NATO Cybersecurity Center of Excellence being based in Tallinn, and Estonian firms becoming leaders in cybersecurity consulting worldwide. The Estonian example is a splendid example of decentralization and self-sovereign identity done right. All medical records, civil data, banking information, is stored in a decentralized mesh called X-Road. Finland and other Nordic countries are now adopting X-Road after Estonia's success with it. If you wish to speak more about this, I'd be glad to, but you're wrong on all fronts. I don't want to regurgitate my blockchain arguments, but if you Ctrl-F this thread for "Right to Vote", you will find my contention about how verifiable, anonymous, and single-vote elections can be held on-chain. But don't get me wrong, I'm not a proponent of it. I still thing in-person paper-ballot voting is the most reasonable way to vote. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia - https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/data-security-meets-diplomacy-why-estonia-storing-its-data-luxembourg-n1018171 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/data-security-meets-diplo...
- galkk 6y ago
  As I see, the problem is not that the vote can be altered, but that the vote can be bought and the fact that person voted in the right fashion could be verified by 3-rd party much more easily (screenshots/whatever). The privacy of voting booth could give at least some chance to change mind/lie to the third party.
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    In theory, mail-in voting carries these same problems, and we're about to hold the largest mail-in voting election ever. Not sure this is really an argument against an electronic voting system. In fact, with a blockchain-based system, the vote could be held in "limbo" until the voter decides to cast it, or you could give the option of creating fake screenshots to deter anyone "buying votes". You can't do this with a paper ballot. The real problem is compiler and hardware level.
    - M2Ys4U 6y ago
      >In theory, mail-in voting carries these same problems, and we're about to hold the largest mail-in voting election ever. And the president is - right now - conducting a denial of service attack on it. If that doesn't show that remote voting is vulnerable I don't know what does...
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        The only reason for a big mail-in election is a historic exploit of an availability vulnerability of our in-person voting system, that it depends on lots and lots of (in practice, mostly older) people willing to spend a day in close contact with each other and other people for almost no pay. > And the president is - right now - conducting a denial of service attack on it. Or at least miming one, perhaps to provide political cover for Republican-governed swing state legislatures, seeing the problems of in-person voting in the pandemic and armed with the telegraphed disruption of vote by mail as cover and polling data as motivation, to simply exercise their prerogative to cancel public voting and assign a set of Presidential electors without it, which the Republican control of the Senate can guarantee withstand any challenge in the electoral vote count. If he really wanted electoral chaos by disrupting vote-by-mail, there'd by no reason to telegraph it; the reason to telegraph it is because he desires a response that it either provokes or justifies, as much, more than, or perhaps even instead of the disruption itself.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Scarblac 6y ago
  It's not anonymous enough. If you sell your vote or are coerced, you can show your proof to the buyer.
cheph 6y ago
> The only downside is the slow speed. Worth it given how important it is.

Proven 6y ago

FFS. What's next, a crowdsourcing campaign? How about they stop losing money and subsidizing Amazon?

nobodywastaken 6y ago

wow what a politically relevant thing to do. I'm sure this has nothing to do with partisan politics and is purely a technologically interesting development. I will likely dig deeper into this new groundbreaking technology.

sebmellen 6y ago

My whole startup is built on blockchain, and I'm an Estonian e-Resident (Estonia allows their citizens to vote digitally), so I find blockchain voting fascinating. That said, there are some problems with it. This Tom Scott video explains why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs. But this is a very cool idea: combining the USPS vote-by-mail infrastructure with a blockchain layer that sits on top, used mainly to provide anonymous provenance. We'll see if this ever gets implemented, but I think it's a great example of the non-hype uses for blockchains being explored.

peignoir 6y ago
Oh cool, not related to the article directly but I m off to Estonia and working on a blockchain (tezos) voting system and community if interested : www.electis.io
- sebmellen 6y ago
  Interesting. For lower stakes voting, this could be a great implementation. I have good friends building a Tezos startup right now (Tezsure) - certainly an interesting chain! We're on Stellar mainly because of block times. You can see a beta of our timestamping service (mainly built for scientists... launch coming soon) here: https://assembl.app/chronos https://assembl.app/chronos
amelius 6y ago
Very nice video, though in the personally delivered sponsored message at the end he seems to be contradicting himself. Why would you still trust a password manager after seeing the video? And wouldn't it be incredibly stupid if an entire nation put their passwords in a vault controlled by some company in possibly another nation?
- sebmellen 6y ago
  That's a good point. I suppose it's poignant in a way — though we might wish to stop the tide, everything is digitizing. Voting will inevitably be swept up in this process, and it's not a matter of if we should do it or not, but how we do it best. And for what it's worth, password managers are a very good idea (though probably not worth staking an election on). I would however recommend Bitwarden: https://bitwarden.com https://bitwarden.com, which is open-source and well-audited. In cryptography we trust (and we probably will for voting someday soon as well)!

kfrzcode 6y ago

Electronic voting is a terrible idea. Attacks on paper & pen ballot systems are much, much harder to scale. Here's Tom Scott with a great explanation of the basics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

ianleeclark 6y ago
> Attacks on paper & pen ballot systems are much, much harder to scale. As it turns out, you can just impose austerity.
tdons 6y ago
The same argument applies to the internet at large. Shall we move back to filing cabinets because that makes data leaks more difficult? I'm sure that at some point we'll crack the electronic voting nut. But yeah: it's scary and the stakes are high. Then again, we've fixed electronic banking and that runs pretty nicely without many problems -- right?
- Swenrekcah 6y ago
  Electronic banking works prescicely because it isn't a secret semi-anonymous blockchain thing. If credit card payments end up in the wrong account, someone notices. If an electronic voting system assigns votes to the wrong candidate, who notices?
- mhh__ 6y ago
  There are next to no stakes with electronic banking compared to voting. Money is a totally different prospect to rigging an election. The Trump campaign did some extremely shady things with Wikileaks and the GRU, can you imagine if he was now leading the US through COVID after the Russians were able to compromise the voting system? The constitution does not have a mechanism to deal with it, as far as I can see. What's the point when paper works already and is almost impossible to scale. Voting is easy

Exorus18 6y ago

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/

nathias 6y ago

We should be experimenting with electronic voting for 30 years and innovate solutions to its problems. Nobody thinks it doesn't have problems, but to just stop at pen and paper voting just means to affirm the problems of pen and paper which are IMO much worse. (scarce voting, batched issues)

fsh 6y ago
Most european countries simply don't have any problems with pen and paper voting. Turnout is typically much larger than in the US with its crazy mix of electronic/mail-in/in-person voting. Probably this is due to automatic voter registration for all citizens, having the elections on Sunday or on a holiday, and (in some cases) not having a first-past-the-post system where a large fraction of votes don't matter anyway.
- nathias 6y ago
  Yes we do, everyone has them. There is an unimaginable difference between a system where you can have a referendum on =X once per year and it costs 10mil or a system where you can have a referendum every second and it costs ~0. We can then vote for issues directly instead of having people that may or may not (as is most often the case) vote in a way they signal they would before elected.
  - mhh__ 6y ago
    Referenda are a terrible way of governing. Think about Brexit - bad faith arguing from one side, constant lying, no plan about how to actually leave, and then a protest vote pushed it last 50% so now we have to leave on a no deal because it's an impossible policy to do in a few years. A referendum is OK for deep constitutional issues, but policy should not be decided by referenda especially vague ones. Policy is also quite hard to undo, a direct voting system would like lead to us living in a rent-controlled, capital punishment-ing, overtaxed reactionary world.
    - sebmellen 6y ago

Galanwe 6y ago

What troubles me with this is that at some point in the system there will need to be a mapping "real identity" -> "ID of voter in the blockchain". What happens the day this mapping leaks?

foepys 6y ago
Even if that's solved: what happens when voters lose they key? Or worse: get it stolen from them.
soulofmischief 6y ago
Ideally you should be able to produce a unique hash each time you vote, derived from your master key. The server doesn't need to know your private key. This is how crypto works now, generating unique and theoretically unlinkable wallet addresses from a secret key.
sebmellen 6y ago
In theory, this on-chain voter ID would never have to be "mapped" directly to a voter. Rather, IDs are simply private-public keypair accounts, and all that's provisioned by the holders of the election is the right to vote with one account. Then, the vote is cast by redeeming this right to vote token, without the voting account ever being linked to a "real identity". Of course, there are problems here too. Mainly with UX, and then at a low level the hardware used (the general public is very easy to hack if you have nation-state power).
- marzell 6y ago
  How does this compare with Estonia and their use of public ID numbers? I just know they don't consider their ID numbers secret the way SSNs are in the US, yet they use them for everything. How do they prevent fraud and ID theft?
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    In Estonia, a user has a digital ID card, which contains a secure chip. Neither they or their computers can ever read the private keys contained in this chip. The card is minted like a passport or driver's license, so it's basically impossible to get a card for someone you aren't. The voting system works similarly to this "right to vote" token model in the backend, from what I know of it. The only difference is that the ID card is where the sensitive data is statically encoded (not on a theoretically hackable computer). They did have some cryptography problems a while back though. The government says it was not too big of a deal because they caught the bug, and would never have held an election with the bug still present. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/estonia-advanced-digital-society-here-s-how-that-helped-it-during-covid-19/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/estonia-advanced-digi... https://www.reuters.com/article/estonia-gemalto/estonia-sues-gemalto-for-152-mln-euros-over-id-card-flaws-idUSL8N1WD5JZ https://www.reuters.com/article/estonia-gemalto/estonia-sues...

barbegal 6y ago

You could easily replace the word Blockchain in this patent application with the word database and it would all still make sense. Blockchains (I prefer to call them Merkle trees) were invented 40 years ago. The interesting part about cryptocurrency based Blockchains that makes them unforgeable is that they contain proof of work. The work to create an entire Blockchain is equal to the sum of the work contained in each node. Without proof of work Blockchains are easily forgeable.

DarthGhandi 6y ago
How do you prove the database hasn't been tampered with?
- barbegal 6y ago
  You can't but how can you prove the blockchain hasn't been tampered with?
  - flixic 6y ago
    Proof of Work, chain of blocks.
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    If you are asking, then you don't understand how the blockchain works. It's literally the entire point of the chain.
    - RunawayGalaxy 6y ago
      Prove that your blockchain hasn't been compromised by a sophisticated 51% attack.
      - RealityVoid 6y ago
        You can't. A 51% attack is literally "the network". And I wouldn't call a 51% attack sophisticated, really. It's just having a bigger hammer than the other guy.

pgt 6y ago

Maybe this is a dumb idea, but what if for each election we issued a ballot containing a unique, random, sequential prime number to every registered voter? Then, when counting the votes for each candidate we display the running product of all the primes counted for that candidate as a "checksum", or "check product". This retains privacy while allowing individual voters to easily verify that their vote was counted by simply dividing their party's checksum by their prime ballot number and confirming that it is a factor of the check product. By displaying a running product of votes, you can also verify that your vote was not counted before you voted. Additionally, this prevents double counting because the "checksum" for N primes must match exactly N votes and no two candidates can share a factor. By issuing sequences of primes to certain regions, you can get some metrics by state. Then you institute a rule that if some % of primes dispute that theirs was counted correctly, a recount is automatically triggered.

luckylion 6y ago
It allows for verification not only by the voter but also by third parties, doesn't it? That would make it possibly to sell votes (with proof!) or threaten people with repercussions unless they vote a certain way.
- compsciphd 6y ago
  what's a bigger threat. "selling votes" or unverifiable election. i.e. we generally say election fraud is not a huge problem because its too easy to get caught. if that's the case, one would think any vote buying scheme would be even easier to get caught.
  - Ekaros 6y ago
    Or coercion. If at any point your vote can be known, there is very high risk that someone forces you to vote like they want. Only way to prevent this is total anonymity of which vote was by which person.
    - compsciphd 6y ago

Yetanfou 6y ago

Did they also invent a system which protects against voter coercion? If they did not, they might as well stop now since no matter how secure the voting system is its relevance falls down to zero if it is possible for the local gang leader to coerce voters to vote for 'his' candidate - "my man stands behind you to watch you vote for candidate X, if you so much as twitch your little girl gets whipped" (which works but doesn't scale that well) or "you show me proof of you voting for candidate X or we'll burn down your house" (which scales but depends on vote verifiability and as such is rather easily foiled).

sebmellen 6y ago
This is a ridiculous argument, because it could just as well apply to mail-in voting as blockchain-based voting. I also think this fear is far overstated (do we have any stories of this happening in the US?) and the more pernicious forms of voter suppression and misinformation are downplayed. If blockchain systems allow 90% of the populace to vote unencumbered, with a 5% inaccuracy rate (which is far higher than to be expected), that's still more democratic than only 70% voting. EDIT: There are also ways to guard against voter coercion, for example by allowing "fake votes" to be cast, which if not cast with a certain memo in the transaction, will not be counted. This memo can be a PIN that the user is given as their "legitimate vote PIN", without which the vote would be invalid. When the user wants to appease their "mob boss", they would simply vote with another pin, and the vote would show as having gone through. This is a surface-level solution, but the technical architecture that can be built to avoid voter coercion in a digital system is far greater than that with mail-in voting. With mail-in voting, your "mob boss" just forces you to tick a box, and put the sealed ballot in the nearest USPS drop box.
- donaltroddyn 6y ago
  It's certainly not a ridiculous argument. Anonymity is a cornerstone of fair voting systems, and any system that allows votes to be deanonymised increases the risk of coercion. The same type of risk applies to postal voting, although with less severity, as with postal voting there is only one opportunity to check the coerced vote. Blockchain based votes can be checked after the fact. Still, for this reason, postal voting is rare, and most countries that allow it do so only for citizens living abroad or who cannot travel to a polling station die to injury or illness. Countries like the UK and Australia that allow any eligible voter to do so by mail are rare.

todaysAI 6y ago

Maybe they should maintain the postal boxes, have enough sorting machines, maintain the necessary manpower/processes, and remain independent enough to deliver the fucking mail.

ben509 6y ago
Even if they did all that, all the states would need reliable mailing lists. Oregon and Washington have been rigorously checking their lists precisely because of this problem, while other states don't need to do that if the onus is on the voter to show up at the correct poll. It turns out that 17% of Nevada primary ballots had the wrong address. If over 10% of votes are mailed to the wrong address, it would be a major crisis in a hotly contested election. [1]: https://publicinterestlegal.org/files/NV-2020-Primary-1P-1.pdf https://publicinterestlegal.org/files/NV-2020-Primary-1P-1.p...

aoowii 6y ago

Am I the only one still against network-based, and to a lesser extent electronic-based, voting? It's near impossible to rig or suppress a physical election without a lot of effort, but one person can DDoS an entire network and no one can vote and the whole election needs to be scrapped. Not even the strongest cryptographic or software systems are free from exploits (especially over time) and there's no way to be sure the open source code for the system is the same code actually being served on the system. A lot of software has died by its own hubris by assuming their systems are secure and then a single 17 year old on 4chan finds a bug and ruins it all. You can't afford for that to happen in an election. Forget hackers, some skilled social engineering gets you the votes of thousands, but you cannot do that in person so easily. I'm sure the problems have been discussed extensively but other niche problems include lack of availability for rural areas (which has been a huge problem even with paper voting). I think the only reliable voting system at scale is in person.

plankers 6y ago
You're not the only one. https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
- doublesCs 6y ago
  > Our entire field is bad at what we do. Our entire field is bad at what we do, because it's full of coders instead of engineers. Think about it. Building airplanes reliably has been figured out by aircraft engineers, building elevators safely has been figured out by building engineers, and building software reliably has been figured out by software _engineers_ (the NASA kind, who landed a spacecraft on the moon). However, this isn't the experience you have on your regular job. "Oh, oops, everything failed because I forgot to do X". Can you imagine if the moon lander crashed because some guy forgot to do that manual thing he's always supposed to do? Of course you can't imagine, because they put actual engineers in charge of that, not coders.
  - ForHackernews 6y ago
    > building software reliably has been figured out by software _engineers_ This is patently untrue when it comes to security. OpenBSD is the closest thing I'm aware of to a "secure" widely used system, and I'm sure that OpenBSD machines are compromised every day. The day that a network exploit is treated with the same seriousness as a commercial jetliner crash is the day I'll believe software security has grown up.

Ekaros 6y ago

What is wrong with in-person paper-ballots? They have worked for centuries. And continue to be the absolute best system from multiple criteria.

diffeomorphism 6y ago
Covid? Waiting in long lines? Not having votes on a holiday like in civilized countries?
- Swenrekcah 6y ago
  All of those are solvable (and solved in most western countries). Re. Covid, it would be a simple solution to spread in person voting out a few days. It would be an inconvenience but no need to invent a new system.
  - TheHypnotist 6y ago
    You overestimate the current government of the USA.
    - Fjolsvith 6y ago
      The federal government doesn't handle vote tallying or polling, so why your comment?
      - mhh__ 6y ago
        The federal government also doesn't set the drinking age. The Trump administration seems to be trying to ratfuck an entire election. They won't succeed, but "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest"-style comments from trump about fraud and months of delays in the results are beyond asinine. I'm slightly amazed that HN seems to have a contingent of I'm alright jack supporters of him. Maybe that says something about our ethics but I won't go there.
  - Touche 6y ago

brainzap 6y ago

It will all run on servers, where I am the administrator.

devin 6y ago

For those commenting, I suggest looking into ElectionGuard.

shrubble 6y ago

I never understood why voting remains such an issue. Why not have the credit card companies handle voting? The cost of a card with the chip is less than $2 isn't it? The card is swiped into a reader, the ballot is displayed on screen, choices are made and confirmed, a laser printer prints out a paper ballot which is dropped into a secure box. We would know within 1 hour of polls closing the accurate tally of every race.

violetyellow 6y ago
Suppose I'm a bad guy with Trump, I command the credit card company to issue 1 million fake cards with names which are passed away in last century. Ask my agents to sweep these cards and vote for me. How could you civilians prevent these things from happening?
- diebeforei485 6y ago
  Vote by mail is also vulnerable to this.
- shrubble 6y ago
  Voter rolls are maintained by the separate states.

naveen99 6y ago

anonymous, verifiable: chose one. I would chose verifiable.

halfFact 6y ago
I'm with you. If someone votes for someone, they should also be held accountable for their Politicians actions.

naveen99 6y ago

Regarding sale of verifiable votes. Why not regulate the sale and tax it ?

nhumrich 6y ago

Why does a government service provider need to file a patent?

Fjolsvith 6y ago
To prevent another entity from hoarding the solution?

jachell 6y ago

I thought we made it past the era of every company having a blockchain patent.

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

Blockchain is important, but perhaps equally as important is the ability for every user of the system to be able to audit every other user, that is, vote/voter exact information transparency...

lixtra 6y ago

The caltech voting project has a nice collection if papers about electronic voting: http://www.vote.caltech.edu/ http://www.vote.caltech.edu/

60secz 6y ago

Majority vote in a block chain isn't an election -- it's a 51% attack. Without a consistent economic incentive, too cheap for bad actors to act badly.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

MrXOR 6y ago

For peoples looking for the truth about blockchain voting: https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/PSNR20.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/pubs/PSNR20.pdf

atlgator 6y ago

It's the illusion of safety. There is no facility for identity verification baked into blockchain. You have integrity for the data allowed on the chain but if you let Russian hackers write to it, it undermines the whole thing. Personally I'd rather go with a PKI system that offers non-repudiation.

propogandist 6y ago
what Russian hackers?
- zacharycohn 6y ago
  Apt username for a comment like this.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Russians are to active measures what God is to sin.
brundolf 6y ago
Exactly. This is the entire problem with blockchain: it has absolutely nothing to say about the quality of the data entering the system, which is usually the hard part anyway. But it provides this false sense of security because most people have no idea what it actually means. It's only useful when the entire problem space lives inside the blockchain. As soon as it has to reflect something in the real world, all bets are off.
- the_snooze 6y ago
  It's pretty much par for the course for blockchain bullshit. They promise the world but aren't honest about the limitations of the tech. Yeah, you get data integrity assurance within the blockchain, but that says nothing about the accuracy of that data as it's coming in.

giancarlostoro 6y ago

There's already a few cryptotokens that allow voting on maintenance of said cryptotokens (or affiliated ones) would these not invalidate such a patent? Edit: On another side, what if we did use Blockchain to supplement votes in a different approach. I have not yet looked at how other Cryptotokens handle voting on policies but say we distribute to each state enough tokens per their legal citizen population, and voting places use a single token per voter, maybe a code is attached to their ballot (maybe a district code, only identifying their region?), this in turn pushes the vote into the blockchain for a permanent record, then when all the manual / machine counting is done we compare the blockchain results to see who screwed up, but it would also allow for a slightly more live view of voting in real-time.

diebeforei485 6y ago

If you were creating a society on Mars, would you use a system of people lining up in-person to vote? Probably not. Rigged elections have been a thing for a very long time. The shenanigans in Belarus is only the latest example. Covid-19 will accelerate the inevitable. We're having a mail-in election this year, people will get comfortable voting from home and it's only a matter of time before people start asking why they can't just do it on their phone. I'm excited for blockchain voting.

unnouinceput 6y ago
Wait until people realize there is no need for intermediate people in a lot of areas that can be eliminated with direct voting. Then you'll see a lot of social distress. Current rioting is nothing compared with what's coming
arp242 6y ago
The vote in Belarus was rigged by the government: "Lukashenko controls vote counting, [and abused] a vast security apparatus and a noisy state media machine unwavering in its support for him and contempt for his rivals". In other words: it required a vast conspiracy with many people cooperating in various ways to pull off. We've seen the same with rigged elections in Russia and some other places. Compare this to an electronic system where a very small group of people (possibly even just one person) can potentially significantly skew the election results.
mhh__ 6y ago
Using the Belarus elections as an example here (government meddling) is like saying Litvinenko put the Po is his own tea

mgualt 6y ago

Was this patent filed before or after the head of USPS was installed by the Dear Leader?

jacques_chester 6y ago
Patents take several years to be granted. This is an application, it was filed February 7, 2020.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ddingus 6y ago

So, we are making all the votes a matter of public record? It's either do that, or the voter is forced to blind trust whatever system is used to record their voter intent. To consider this problem properly, think about the problem a blind voter has with a ballot. They cannot see the record of their vote, when it's made by a mark. With a punch card, they cannot see the candidate associated with their record either. They have to trust whoever helps them cast their vote actually does cast it correctly. There is no chain of trust between voter intent and the record of vote cast. Now, in the context of electronic voting, a person touches a screen gives an audio input, whatever. They have to trust the system does what they intend. There is no meaningful verification due to the fact that the system could tell them anything. When a vote is cast on media with a mark, and that mark and media are used for the final tally, the voter knows their intent was recorded, and that intent could be used directly to determine the outcome of the election. (other corruption can happen, and is outside the scope of this comment) Without a public vote record, voters have no idea whether they can trust the election. Blockchain does not help with this problem, unless it's a public affair, everyone sees how everyone else voted. Banking gets around this by always having redundancies. Books are kept in many locations and all must and can be reconciled. Voting has no such redundancy, and due to that, electronic input has a basic trust problem not being discussed enough in my opinion.

ihm 6y ago
You can us zero knowledge proofs plus a blockchain to anonymize votes.
- dQw4w9WgXcQ 6y ago
  This seems to be the tech underneath Algorand. If the USPS created a "Vote Token" and it was truly anonymized, how would a central entity ensure that people were not double-voting etc?
  - ddingus 6y ago
    Exactly.
- 6y ago

graiz 6y ago

A distributed ledger approach is a very bad idea because a foreign country can launch a 51% attack on the ledger and has the resources to win and thus modify the ledger.

ceejayoz 6y ago
You can have a blockchain without a distributed ledger.

anigbrowl 6y ago

If you already have working electronic voting (for the sake of argument) you don't need to elect representatives any more, you can just vote on issues directly and set quorums and thresholds. For that matter you don't really need ballots any more either, you can have the corpus of laws as a wiki and just edit it.

davidajackson 6y ago

Isn't the bigger issue here that someone can file a patent for something so blatantly obvious? Patents in software seem to do nothing good for innovation.

OliverGilan 6y ago

A lot of issues being brought up with electronic voting seem to me to be solvable via a blockchain technology like Ethereum. > Even if the code is open source you cannot know that's the software running on the polling machine. If the entire election happened on an Ethereum smart contract and every voter was given an address to vote with they could verify that their transaction cast a vote to the correct smart contract address and they could know what function was called so they would know how it would behave. You wouldn't have to blindly trust the system because you could verify that your vote went where it was supposed to go. > Social engineering/hacking an online voting pool This is definitely still possible. Any smart contract to handle this would need to be rigorously audited to make sure there are no vulnerabilities. As for social engineering, I do not think this is that big of a deal as long as you emphasize the importance of never sharing your private key. I also do not think it's all or nothing. You could potentially have electronic voting built on blockchain technology but still have it all done in normal polling booths like we do now. The benefit to this is that you have the reliability of in-person polling but the citizen can then also track their vote to add a second layer of verification. Idk, what am I missing that makes this obviously a bad idea?

throwaway936482 6y ago
Because it's utterly utterly unnecessary and can be solved by the very simple tick box, count ballot in public, let anyone watch or volunteer to do so system. The existing problems with the American system of dodgy ballots, hanging chads, OCR errors etc. are causes by too much technology. Get rid of it all and use a wholly manual system. Treat postal votes the same way and count them at the same time as other ballots.

arkanciscan 6y ago

See, this is why I'm voting for Trump; whether he means to or not, he breaks shit, and that's what I think has to happen for progress to occur. Joe is status quo. I want an omelette, not a bunch of eggs.

mhh__ 6y ago
That should be biden's campaign ad. Just have that read out over some photos of people who've died of COVID. Sure he's undermining American democracy, and openly defending white supremacists (white power anyone) but he breaks shit!
- arkanciscan 6y ago
  We need two countries. One for people who just want things to stay the same because they are scared, and one for people who want things to be better.

solarkraft 6y ago

Tom Scott: Why electronic voting is still a bad idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

brundolf 6y ago

There's an XKCD for this: https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/

guenthert 6y ago

Does that mean they can now further de-prioritize mail delivery? I'm waiting for weeks on my EDD debit card. If only someone would have invented a way to transfer funds electronically ...

zelly 6y ago

- Won't work. People will lose their private keys. Apparently the key is distributed to people on a piece of paper in the mail. That will get stolen--or claimed to be stolen. It will be a mess. - What's the point of a blockchain here? Is USPS raising money with an ICO? The use of digital signatures is enough. By having a "distributed public ledger" now you open the possibility of getting Sybil attacked. But wait, you say, USPS has their own canoncial version of the chain that they can force everyone to rollback to in case of an attack--then what was the point of a blockchain? You could just have a website that shows a list of public keys and who they voted for. It would be totally auditable by anyone, just as a blockchain would be, without any of the security risks of a blockchain.

throwawaysea 6y ago

How is this at all patentable? Can someone explain the line between new innovation and application of existing technology?

ycombonator 6y ago

I received two separate ballots on two different people who resided in this house in the past. What’s stopping me from filling both these ballots and mailing them. The point is unless and until the voter roll integrity is guaranteed there is always a possibility of fraud.

yalogin 6y ago

Why does the USPS have a group that thinks about blockchain? If it exists what is this group ?

detaro 6y ago
lots of enterprise-y companies and organizations get small groups to look at buzzword topics, and blockchain has been hyped for a bunch of postal-adjacent topics. Good chunk of the patent authors seem to be external consultants too... Couldn't find anything specific about in what context USPS specifically looked at that.