6 ms·

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 verifiabi

by 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...
  - realityking 6y ago
    I’m not American and I’ve never voted in a US election but I can tell you how it’s done in Germany (where electronic is all but impossible due to the standards the voting process is held to be the constitutional court) - Election Day is always a Sunday; most folks don’t work on Sunday. Germany is pretty strict on that in general. Works well for this case. - Each parliamentary district is subdivided into smaller voting districts. - Each voting district is for ~2500 eligible voters. This keeps the lines short. - Each voting district has one polling station (there are exceptions to this, a voting district with a prison or retirement home in it might have 2nd location) - The voting district is run by volunteers. If there aren’t enough volunteers the municipality can draft citizens to do it and I’ve seen that happen. More often though the ranks are filled up with city employees, I’ve twice filled a leadership position in my voting district so I’m quite familiar with the rules. - The diverse set of folks in the voting district keep the process in check but any citizen has the right to be in the room and observe the whole process. I’ve never seen anyone stay the whole day (at that point why not volunteer?) but I’ve seen folks show up for the counting. - the process starts by showing the empty ballot container to all people present. During voting the container can’t be opened (multiple locks) - as we do the count (manually & in a prescribed algorithm) the certain in-between results must be loudly announced to the room - the final results must be loudly announced to the room. Since we’re usually in a class room in a school we also put it on the blackboard - results are tallied up by election commissions on the city, county, state and federal level. City and county election commissions are usually run by the elected leader (unless they’re running for an election themselves), state and federal and run by the the office of statistics - all the results, down the voting district level are available online - I myself have checked numerous times that they count we arrived at in the voting district is correctly reflected on the city website - it’s trivial from there to check if the count of all voting districts adds up to the final end result or not - there are some watchdog organizations observing the overall processes. I trust that and error in adding the results gets caught by them but I could verify this myself since the data is public This is a manual, somewhat expensive (in time, money wise it’s not too bad as volunteers aren’t paid and just get some refreshment money) way of voting. But I see no way of significantly manipulating this process without the involvement of thousands of people. TL;DR if you take the time it’s trivial to check if you’re vote was counted correctly. You’re there to check if the ballot box is empty, you vote, you observe that no one is stuffing votes, you observe the count in the voting district and you check if your voting districts count was accurately reflected in the total
  - pwg 6y ago
    > How does the average citizen verify what is actually happening and that their vote is actually being counted? Volunteer to be a poll worker and to be one of the witnesses during the counting process. You can then watch every step of the process occur openly and see that the votes are being counted accurately. If you watch the process accurately count all of the vote papers in the box at the end of the day, you can reasonably conclude that everyone's vote in that precinct was counted accurately.
    - jlokier 6y ago
      If there are enough randomly selected volunteers, you can reasonably assume trust in their witness accounts together. You don't need to volunteer there personally. But wait... what if everyone assumes the volunteers are mostly ordinary citizens doing their civic duty? What if, in reality, anyone can apply to be a volunteer but the system systematically always chooses its own plants...? And when you volunteer, as luck would have it they pick someone else "at random".
    - foepys 6y ago
      Yes, that why I'm advocating pen and paper in this thread. Nothing is simpler than counting ballots by hand. It's blockchain that makes is impossible for the average voter or even for people with math or CS degrees.
- 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.

by foepys 6y ago

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...
- realityking 6y ago
  I’m not American and I’ve never voted in a US election but I can tell you how it’s done in Germany (where electronic is all but impossible due to the standards the voting process is held to be the constitutional court) - Election Day is always a Sunday; most folks don’t work on Sunday. Germany is pretty strict on that in general. Works well for this case. - Each parliamentary district is subdivided into smaller voting districts. - Each voting district is for ~2500 eligible voters. This keeps the lines short. - Each voting district has one polling station (there are exceptions to this, a voting district with a prison or retirement home in it might have 2nd location) - The voting district is run by volunteers. If there aren’t enough volunteers the municipality can draft citizens to do it and I’ve seen that happen. More often though the ranks are filled up with city employees, I’ve twice filled a leadership position in my voting district so I’m quite familiar with the rules. - The diverse set of folks in the voting district keep the process in check but any citizen has the right to be in the room and observe the whole process. I’ve never seen anyone stay the whole day (at that point why not volunteer?) but I’ve seen folks show up for the counting. - the process starts by showing the empty ballot container to all people present. During voting the container can’t be opened (multiple locks) - as we do the count (manually & in a prescribed algorithm) the certain in-between results must be loudly announced to the room - the final results must be loudly announced to the room. Since we’re usually in a class room in a school we also put it on the blackboard - results are tallied up by election commissions on the city, county, state and federal level. City and county election commissions are usually run by the elected leader (unless they’re running for an election themselves), state and federal and run by the the office of statistics - all the results, down the voting district level are available online - I myself have checked numerous times that they count we arrived at in the voting district is correctly reflected on the city website - it’s trivial from there to check if the count of all voting districts adds up to the final end result or not - there are some watchdog organizations observing the overall processes. I trust that and error in adding the results gets caught by them but I could verify this myself since the data is public This is a manual, somewhat expensive (in time, money wise it’s not too bad as volunteers aren’t paid and just get some refreshment money) way of voting. But I see no way of significantly manipulating this process without the involvement of thousands of people. TL;DR if you take the time it’s trivial to check if you’re vote was counted correctly. You’re there to check if the ballot box is empty, you vote, you observe that no one is stuffing votes, you observe the count in the voting district and you check if your voting districts count was accurately reflected in the total
- pwg 6y ago
  > How does the average citizen verify what is actually happening and that their vote is actually being counted? Volunteer to be a poll worker and to be one of the witnesses during the counting process. You can then watch every step of the process occur openly and see that the votes are being counted accurately. If you watch the process accurately count all of the vote papers in the box at the end of the day, you can reasonably conclude that everyone's vote in that precinct was counted accurately.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    If there are enough randomly selected volunteers, you can reasonably assume trust in their witness accounts together. You don't need to volunteer there personally. But wait... what if everyone assumes the volunteers are mostly ordinary citizens doing their civic duty? What if, in reality, anyone can apply to be a volunteer but the system systematically always chooses its own plants...? And when you volunteer, as luck would have it they pick someone else "at random".
  - foepys 6y ago
    Yes, that why I'm advocating pen and paper in this thread. Nothing is simpler than counting ballots by hand. It's blockchain that makes is impossible for the average voter or even for people with math or CS degrees.
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.