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Not necessarily a dumb idea, but blockchains provide us an easier way to do something similar. Every voter would be provided 1 (one) "Right to Vote" token afte
by sebmellen 6y ago
Not necessarily a dumb idea, but blockchains provide us an easier way to do something similar.
Every voter would be provided 1 (one) "Right to Vote" token after verifying their identity or receiving it by mail (as is the proposed solution from the USPS). This is arguably just as secure as mail-in voting.
Each voter would also have an "on-chain voter ID", which would just be an anonymous public-private keypair in possession of 1 "Right to Vote" token. This on-chain voter ID would never have to be "mapped" directly to a voter. All that's provisioned by the the election overseers is the right to vote with one account by using this token.
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).
- Ekaros 6y agoReceive by mail? At that point I already know that the system is fundamentally broken...
- tudorhn 6y ago> This on-chain voter ID would never have to be "mapped" directly to a voter The government will generate these IDs and then mail them to people. Who’s stopping them from recording the mappings?
- svrb 6y agoWhat's stopping them from not properly separating the outer and inner envelopes in mail-in voting? Or correlating poll booth entries with checkins? Nothing. The system fundamentally assumes the organization operating the poll is trustworthy.
- lalaland1125 6y agoIn case you are interested, the thing preventing those types of shenanigans from happening is volunteer observers from various parties. The inperson and physical nature of things makes it much more difficult to break.
- sebmellen 6y agoYes, and volunteer observers could also ensure that the keypairs mailed out to people are never revealed. 1. An airgapped computer running a keypair generation program generates millions of keypairs. 2. This prints these millions of secure keypairs with the keypair facing "downward". 3. In a publicized setting with volunteer observers, the private keys are sealed into envelopes which don't yet have names or addresses on them, and secured with tamper-proof seals. 4. These ballots are sent through another printing system, which adds an address and name to each ballot, at random. 5. The ballots are mailed out. How is that any different?
- lalaland1125 6y agoThe level of complexity for auditing here is much, much higher than the paper system. How do you verify that the software wasn't backdoored? How do you verify that the computer actually ran that software? What if the hardware had a backdoor? What about the compiler? Even the printers could be compromised. Normally, I would consider these types of issues simply paranoia, but in this case we are talking about very high stake elections that control the spending of trillions of dollars.