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> Anonymity is crucial to voting Why do you think it is crucial? It did not exist in USA until 1888, it did not exist in Rome until 139 BC, start of the end o

by chr1 6y ago

> Anonymity is crucial to voting Why do you think it is crucial? It did not exist in USA until 1888, it did not exist in Rome until 139 BC, start of the end of Roman republic. And in Rome the secret ballot actually have caused civil war, by encouraging the people to vote for laws they could not defend. So voting have worked well without anonymity in the past, and you need better argument why anonymity is crucial, before starting to explore all the unnecessary complexity that it adds to voting.

tsimionescu 6y ago
All of my comment was about the needles complexity that online voting brings to the system even if you disregard anonymity.
- chr1 6y ago
  Sorry, i have misinterpreted your comment, but reading it again i still do not quite understand it. If voting is open people can simply vote from their phones, everyone can check the status of their own vote, there can be two several independent servers running the software and checking each other, the list of voters will be verified the same way it is verified now. Also at first this will not replace normal voting, but augment it for voting on laws. All of this already works in voteflux which is open on github.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    If your tap A on your phone, and your phone shows you that you voted for A, but you later check from your PC and you can see there that you voted for B, what do you do? What do the authorities do? Imagine how easy it would be for the NSA/CIA/NKVD/etc. to deploy malware to infect hundreds of millions of computers to make all those people think that they've voted for someone else. If even 10% of them never bother to check from an uninfected device, the election is meaningless. Also, who deploys the servers? Who controls physical access to them? Who is allowed to check the software running on them? Sure, votsflux may have all their code on GitHub, but the real servers may be running slightly different code, which messes with the data in careful ways. I assume you can export all of the voter data to do the calculations yourself, so at least you can check that when the server says A won, you can check the numbers yourself. But what if they return a slightly altered list, such that if I check my own vote with the vote check API, it shows that I voted for B, but when the data table is exported, I appear to have voted for A, or I appear not to have voted at all? If they change the vote just a bit, odds are few people will ever find out the discrepancies. And even if they can be found out, how long will it take? After the election is over, but before we can have confidence that the results are meaningful, someone needs to make sure that the votes of the vast majority (depending on the closeness of the vote, even 99%+) of people have been checked against the tables that the server produced. This may take days. Also, an adversary can attack this process - get many people to claim that the server incorrectly tabulated their results, that their phones were hacked etc. The authorities will need to spend weeks investigating just to convince themselves whether the results were true or not. And the investigation will have to be handled by trusted experts, who could be bought themselves... Electronic voting is not feasible, and any state that attempts neither cares for its citizens right to vote nor does it understand the sophistication of state-level attackers.

by chr1 6y ago

tsimionescu 6y ago

All of my comment was about the needles complexity that online voting brings to the system even if you disregard anonymity.

chr1 6y ago
Sorry, i have misinterpreted your comment, but reading it again i still do not quite understand it. If voting is open people can simply vote from their phones, everyone can check the status of their own vote, there can be two several independent servers running the software and checking each other, the list of voters will be verified the same way it is verified now. Also at first this will not replace normal voting, but augment it for voting on laws. All of this already works in voteflux which is open on github.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  If your tap A on your phone, and your phone shows you that you voted for A, but you later check from your PC and you can see there that you voted for B, what do you do? What do the authorities do? Imagine how easy it would be for the NSA/CIA/NKVD/etc. to deploy malware to infect hundreds of millions of computers to make all those people think that they've voted for someone else. If even 10% of them never bother to check from an uninfected device, the election is meaningless. Also, who deploys the servers? Who controls physical access to them? Who is allowed to check the software running on them? Sure, votsflux may have all their code on GitHub, but the real servers may be running slightly different code, which messes with the data in careful ways. I assume you can export all of the voter data to do the calculations yourself, so at least you can check that when the server says A won, you can check the numbers yourself. But what if they return a slightly altered list, such that if I check my own vote with the vote check API, it shows that I voted for B, but when the data table is exported, I appear to have voted for A, or I appear not to have voted at all? If they change the vote just a bit, odds are few people will ever find out the discrepancies. And even if they can be found out, how long will it take? After the election is over, but before we can have confidence that the results are meaningful, someone needs to make sure that the votes of the vast majority (depending on the closeness of the vote, even 99%+) of people have been checked against the tables that the server produced. This may take days. Also, an adversary can attack this process - get many people to claim that the server incorrectly tabulated their results, that their phones were hacked etc. The authorities will need to spend weeks investigating just to convince themselves whether the results were true or not. And the investigation will have to be handled by trusted experts, who could be bought themselves... Electronic voting is not feasible, and any state that attempts neither cares for its citizens right to vote nor does it understand the sophistication of state-level attackers.