6 ms·

Let's put e-voting where it belongs: on the trash-heap of bad ideas (2016)

52 points by madeofpalk 6y ago

jjeaff 6y ago
Almost all voting in America uses software to some extent. Whether it is the counting machines, Scantron readers or electronic voting booths, we are already using software. What more software could do though, is create more transparency. And I can't believe I'm saying this, but this may actually be one of those cases where blockchain could be useful. It is absolutely absurd to me that we have thousands of non-experts deciding to keep or throw out ballots based on comparing a signature. With a more electronic method, a citizen's vote could be signed with a key generated from a few unique identifiers like social security number, numbers in your street address and maybe a credit card number. My vote could then be forever logged in the blockchain. This could create more transparency because everyone could see and count the votes. After voting, you could also give every voter a "receipt" where they could go online and check in the public blockchain to confirm that their vote was counted successfully. And I don't think we would need any sort of shared and distributed blockchain. Just a public one that can be verified by 3rd parties. AWS has a managed blockchain service that I'm sure would work fine. So while it may not be a good idea to open the actual voting to the entire public internet, that doesn't mean that sound math and technology couldn't be used to make elections more transparent and thus, secure.
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  Can’t blockchains be manipulated by whoever has more computers?
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    Yes, but only if you are relying on a distributed system. You can still have a centrally controlled blockchain. And the blockchain would simply allow anyone to easily verify data integrity.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Why do you need a blockchain if you trust the local election operation? And if you don't trust the local election operation, I have terrible news for you; they are still the legal authority. Citizens are already able to verify their mail/absentee ballot online, today, without a blockchain [1]. I do agree with you that the US needs to adopt something like Estonia's national ID system [2], with cryptographic signing capabilities for official purposes, but this should only (for elections) be used to digitally sign your paper ballot (with similar weight that your hand signature on a paper ballot would carry). We should also encourage mail/absentee ballots for everyone in every state. [1] https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-track-your-absentee-ballot-by-state https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-track-your-absentee-ball... (How to Track Your Absentee Ballot by State) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card
  - gremlinsinc 6y ago
    Not every state has tracking... at a glimpse Florida doesn't. I think the best option is everyone has an issued id, don't remember it? You can use your SSN or state id (drivers license), the # is mailed to you when you register/re-register or get your ballot. You can vote as you normally would, you can setup 2-factor methods on your id's. If you have a phone 2-factor set, the minute your vote is tallied you get notified of the result, if it's not what you chose, you can contest it. Easy one-click-at-all-times access to voting trail, also uniformity, we need a system like this to be uniform, we need to end 50 states with different rules per county on how things are run.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > (How to Track Your Absentee Ballot by State) I went to look at this. It operates on the honor system; what purpose is it supposed to serve? An actual ballot-tracking system would need to provide me some evidence that they knew something about my ballot. This doesn't.
  - 6y ago
- pydry 6y ago
  The usual response to this is that it enables vote buying. However, vote buying literally stopped being an issue the day it started being prosecuted seriously and never came back. You simply can't do it at meaningful scale without getting caught.
  - parliament32 6y ago
    >You simply can't do it at meaningful scale without getting caught. Why not? Just run a Tor site, where users can submit their receipt/verification and get crypto. "Free money" will spread fast with barely any marketing, and as we've seen from voter turnouts, lots of people don't give a shit and will happily sell their vote to the highest bidder.
    - pydry 6y ago
      And what's to stop the feds setting up 10 competing sites and then fining everybody who sold their votes 10x the amount they were hoping to get? Which of the 11 tor sites will you submit your receipt to now?
- parliament32 6y ago
  >After voting, you could also give every voter a "receipt" where they could go online and check in the public blockchain to confirm that their vote was counted successfully. The problem with verifiable voting has always been that it opens the market to vote-selling. If you can prove how you voted, your vote can be sold for a significant amount of money -- or worse, your employer insisting you vote a certain way, and asking for your receipt after. This won't work until there's a mechanism where you can confirm your vote while also having plausible deniability.
  - rodgerd 6y ago
    Or, more likely, vote blackmail.
    - Terr_ 6y ago
      I think you mean extortion. Blackmail is more specific, and implies a threat to reveal a secret. For example, an employer who threatens to fire employees who "vote wrong" would not be blackmail.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    You simply wouldn't identify the person making the vote. You are assigned a random identifier that is actually publicly available. So if I vote and give you my identifier to prove how I voted, you have no way of verifying if I am giving you my actual receipt or just some other receipt from the publicly accessible register of voters. The only way to truly validate the vote would be to match the receipt id with the internally held ballot that has your pii on it.
    - parliament32 6y ago
      Then how do you prove x% of the voters for candidate A weren't just given the same identifier? This'd defeat the purpose of being able to verify your vote in the first place, something unique to you has to be in the record too.
      - 6y ago
- SahAssar 6y ago
  I think you're missing a few things: Votes should never be identifiable and the count should be verifiable. First of all: using somewhat public things like SSN, "numbers in your street address" and a credit card number is a terrible idea. All of those have been leaked and are present on things you present to identify yourself or pay. Also requiring a credit card or home to vote would almost certainly be unconstitutional. Getting a "receipt" is also problematic: You should never be able to prove you voted A over B or vice versa since that opens up ways to intimidate people to vote one way and coerce them to prove it. I'm not saying it's impossible but there are so many problems with electronic voting that I don't even know where to start. At least with physical ballots we can manually recount if we need. And that's before we even start talking about how current systems are basically swiss cheese for hacks, just look at the voting village for the last couple of defcons. Related (and amusing) links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
  - wavefunction 6y ago
    The ballot itself could be a zk-SNARK written to a blockchain signed with a private key owned by the voter.
    - SahAssar 6y ago
      Sorry, I'm not well versed enough in zk-SNARK, can you explain how it solves the problems above? If it does do you think that you can make the general public trust/understand it enough to run a election?
    - wavefunction 6y ago
      Sorry can't reply to your reply but... Making the ballot a zk-SNARK[0] would allow it to be queried for validity of certain assertions like "Did this ballot contain a vote for Candidate A or Proposition B" without leaking the identity of the voter. The voter's private key could decrypt the entire ballot perhaps for the voter's verification or even as another verifiable assertion that the ballot was signed with the specific key. Perhaps there would be a key provided by the voting authority body as another verifiable assertion that would allow the voting authority body to verify the user for their purposes if required. I agree that the more difficult part of this would be encouraging adoption and supporting use. There are hardware keys like yubikeys or hardware crypto wallets that can be populated with voter-generated keys to be used in the voting process, and these hardware keys could be populated in a process similar to getting a driver's license perhaps, except not waiting for it to arrive in the mail. Perhaps you go into your local clerk's office and they have a one-time key generator that populates your hardware key. I definitely haven't fleshed this idea out beyond some basic musings. [0]https://z.cash/technology/zksnarks/ https://z.cash/technology/zksnarks/
- dogma1138 6y ago
  Electronic voting changes the threat model which opens the door for large scale voting fraud which is impossible with the current system. Also in the US you don’t have a single election, you have 50 individual elections all with different ballots and different rules, the federal government doesn’t run the elections in each state. This means that you’ll have 50 different systems. There is little that technology can do with a system that already provides transparency by having a physical hard copy of each vote cast and allowing essentially any citizen to become an observer.
totony 6y ago
This article is very poor in that it has no real argument as for why it's bad. Here's what it asserts: - We don't care about the speed of the results. That is trivially false, everyone is following the reporting, Trump is out there saying he won, people question the delays and suggest they may give time for bad actors to rig the vote. - It's too expensive - There is no backing to this claim except "it systems routinely go over budget" - It disregards secrecy as important - secrecy is a vital part of an election process. It allows people to freely have any opinion they want without consequence or fear of people forcing them to vote for someone else (violence or other). - Accessibility - I'm not sure how they can assert that we can't make e voting accessible? EDIT: For those downvoting, please do provide a reason why you disagree with what I said. Is any argument in that article actually strong?
greenduck 6y ago
Tom Scott still has the best argument against e-voting IMO [1]. Briefly: an election only counts if everybody can believe the results. Making an expert level understanding of CS a requirement to verify your voting system means that Joe Q. Average who doesn't hold a PhD (or maybe even a college degree) has to rely on spooky experts telling him what to believe. If I were in his shoes then I would have no confidence that I participated in a fair and valid election. We kind of live in a bubble here on HN where most people are sort of in the tech space and could take a weekend or two to understand blockchain. I think its easy to forget that most people don't have the required background to learn it easily (or would want to use up their time to understand it). I almost have a PhD in the hard sciences and I don't fully understand the finer details of block chain. I think I would have to write my own implementation to fully appreciate it. Simplicity and the ability to explain the system to every American is a requirement of any voting system. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs&t=12s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs&t=12s
- trhway 6y ago
  >Joe Q. Average who doesn't hold a PhD (or maybe even a college degree) has to rely on spooky experts telling him what to believe. The Joe is for example driving a car full of electronics and somehow he doesn't have issue trusting his life to it. And, if anything, i'm pretty sure that deep understanding of that car's electronics and software would make the Joe to only trust his car less (one can google the software expert's opinions during the Prius self-acceleration story)
  - superwayne 6y ago
    I can see that the car works by getting safely from A to B, thousands of times. If my vote counted or not is not observable.
    - trhway 6y ago
      any e-voting system of course must make it observable. Otherwise it just wouldn't make any sense.
    - 6y ago
IndrekR 6y ago
I think it is time to implement things correctly in US as well. Closed unverifiable voting system is as good as an e-voting system as DocuSign is good as an e-signature system. There are proven mathematical ways that make sure, without using blockchain, that the votes and voters are correct [1]. Then again, I am biased as I am lucky enough to enjoy the benefits of well implemented electronic voting and signing system in Estonia. Source code for Estonian voting system is published in GitHub [2]. [1] http://research.cyber.ee/~jan/publ/mobileverification-ieee.pdf http://research.cyber.ee/~jan/publ/mobileverification-ieee.p... [2]https://github.com/vvk-ehk https://github.com/vvk-ehk
- dogma1138 6y ago
  Estonia has a National ID with a smart card on it. This isn’t possible for nations which do not want mandatory ID laws. It also then makes the ID card a good target which specifically the Estonian one was found to have quite a few issues. Lastly trust in a voting system isn’t just can someone alter the vote but how easy it would be to deny people from voting and any electronic voting system will be susceptible to a wide range of denial of service attacks, what’s worse that these systems are susceptible to denial of service attacks that could corrupt votes cast causing not only those votes to be cast out but making the entire system being suspect.
golemiprague 6y ago
For me it looks like voting with no ID or by mail is much more of a trash idea. I can't understand how you can verify who is voting in this type of system. Doing it electronically or not is the least of my concerns, it is the process in the US that is inherently wrong.
dmalvarado 6y ago
I am surprised that there is no digital option to preselect your candidates before going to the polling place. i.e. Make your choices, receive QR code. Go to polling place, scan, verify selections on voting machine, press big red button and walk out of there. If each vote took 1 minute instead of 10, would there still be a line? edit: Or if not shorter lines, maybe 5 voting machines instead of 20? or 4 poll workers instead of 10? Seems more efficient all around.
stretchwithme 6y ago
We never needed electronic voting to prevent the hanging chad issue. All we needed to do was help people properly encode their paper ballots. That can be done with open source software running on a PC connected to a punch card machine. We could also let voters confirm their choices with a punch card reader hooked up to another PC running separately developed software at the polling place. You can still the votes electronically. But also count the physical ballots. Two counts are better than one. Somebody woould have to change both to hide cheating. Record the raw ballot in a block at the same time to make it even harder. These are solvable problems. If we can keep cryptocurrency honest, we can do it with votes.
Aerroon 6y ago
I'm from Estonia and Estonia has an e-voting system. It seems to be relatively decent as far as decent can be, but I still don't like it. Estonia's government issued ID card has a chip on it, like a debit card. The card contains a private key. The card uses a two-factor authentication system: you have the physical card itself (with the private key) and 3 PIN codes. PIN1 along with the card is used to identify you. PIN2 along with the card can be used to give electronic signatures. A PUK code along with the card can be used to unblock the card if the user enters a PIN incorrectly 3 times in a row. The system is pretty convenient. It allows us to do things like online banking, give electronic signatures on documents (you put the file in a container and sign the container), and also electronically vote. Effectively, it's a way to electronically verify whether somebody is who they say they are, and this verification is backed by the government. It is convenient to electronically vote. Some time before election day people can cast their vote via an application on their PC. They can vote multiple times. Online voting ends before election day and anybody can go vote in person even if they've cast an electronic vote. The last vote cast counts. This makes buying votes ineffective, because a person could sell their vote any number of times to different candidates. After you vote a QR code appears in the application. You can read that QR code with your smartphone to check on your vote for 30 minutes or 1 hour after voting. The server side source code is open.[0] The votes get moved to a counting server and get counted. There are quite a few issues in this process as found by an independent audit.[1] (I really recommend reading it if you're interested in this topic.) However, most of those problems seem to be relatively unlikely or at least there's a good chance we would know that something is fishy. However, I don't like e-voting. I have three main problems with this system: 1. The system is opaque to the layman. The government can take every step to ensure transparency in the e-voting process, but it doesn't matter to the average person. An average person doesn't understand enough about how software and computers work to be able to tell whether foul-play was happening or not. The process of voting in person, counting those votes and tallying them up are much easier to understand. It's easier for an average person to tell whether the in-person voting process is being tampered with or not. I think this point alone makes e-voting a bad choice. 2. It relies on the security of the average user's devices. It's conceivable that a large scale malware attack could compromise the machine the user votes on and the device the user uses to verify their vote. It's unlikely, but Estonia is small - it can never put in the resources that a large country could. 3. It relies on the security of third party software and hardware. If consumer/enterprise hardware is compromised on a global scale, then that likely means that the e-voting system is vulnerable too. E-voting is more convenient, but ultimately I think that such convenience is overshadowed by the risk. In person voting in Estonia is very easy (at least in cities). It has never taken me more than 10 minutes from arriving at the voting location to leaving. If the goal was to just make voting more convenient, then they could've just added more voting booths and put them in supermarkets. [0] https://github.com/vvk-ehk https://github.com/vvk-ehk [1] https://estoniaevoting.org/findings/summary/ https://estoniaevoting.org/findings/summary/
6456457 6y ago
Throw opposition to voter ID laws (you know, the kind every country in Europe has) on the trash-heap with it. At this point Republicans mostly believe the Democrats have or are in the process of stealing the election, and they collectively will have little faith in presidential elections going forward until robust voter ID laws are put into effect. The arguments against these laws are underwhelming, given how often you need to show ID for other things, and lead Republicans to suspect Progressives want to stuff ballot boxes.

52 points by madeofpalk 6y ago

Almost all voting in America uses software to some extent. Whether it is the counting machines, Scantron readers or electronic voting booths, we are already using software. What more software could do though, is create more transparency. And I can't believe I'm saying this, but this may actually be one of those cases where blockchain could be useful. It is absolutely absurd to me that we have thousands of non-experts deciding to keep or throw out ballots based on comparing a signature. With a more electronic method, a citizen's vote could be signed with a key generated from a few unique identifiers like social security number, numbers in your street address and maybe a credit card number. My vote could then be forever logged in the blockchain. This could create more transparency because everyone could see and count the votes. After voting, you could also give every voter a "receipt" where they could go online and check in the public blockchain to confirm that their vote was counted successfully. And I don't think we would need any sort of shared and distributed blockchain. Just a public one that can be verified by 3rd parties. AWS has a managed blockchain service that I'm sure would work fine. So while it may not be a good idea to open the actual voting to the entire public internet, that doesn't mean that sound math and technology couldn't be used to make elections more transparent and thus, secure.

madeofpalk 6y ago
Can’t blockchains be manipulated by whoever has more computers?
- jjeaff 6y ago
  Yes, but only if you are relying on a distributed system. You can still have a centrally controlled blockchain. And the blockchain would simply allow anyone to easily verify data integrity.
toomuchtodo 6y ago
Why do you need a blockchain if you trust the local election operation? And if you don't trust the local election operation, I have terrible news for you; they are still the legal authority. Citizens are already able to verify their mail/absentee ballot online, today, without a blockchain [1]. I do agree with you that the US needs to adopt something like Estonia's national ID system [2], with cryptographic signing capabilities for official purposes, but this should only (for elections) be used to digitally sign your paper ballot (with similar weight that your hand signature on a paper ballot would carry). We should also encourage mail/absentee ballots for everyone in every state. [1] https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-track-your-absentee-ballot-by-state https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-track-your-absentee-ball... (How to Track Your Absentee Ballot by State) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_identity_card
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  Not every state has tracking... at a glimpse Florida doesn't. I think the best option is everyone has an issued id, don't remember it? You can use your SSN or state id (drivers license), the # is mailed to you when you register/re-register or get your ballot. You can vote as you normally would, you can setup 2-factor methods on your id's. If you have a phone 2-factor set, the minute your vote is tallied you get notified of the result, if it's not what you chose, you can contest it. Easy one-click-at-all-times access to voting trail, also uniformity, we need a system like this to be uniform, we need to end 50 states with different rules per county on how things are run.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > (How to Track Your Absentee Ballot by State) I went to look at this. It operates on the honor system; what purpose is it supposed to serve? An actual ballot-tracking system would need to provide me some evidence that they knew something about my ballot. This doesn't.
- 6y ago
pydry 6y ago
The usual response to this is that it enables vote buying. However, vote buying literally stopped being an issue the day it started being prosecuted seriously and never came back. You simply can't do it at meaningful scale without getting caught.
- parliament32 6y ago
  >You simply can't do it at meaningful scale without getting caught. Why not? Just run a Tor site, where users can submit their receipt/verification and get crypto. "Free money" will spread fast with barely any marketing, and as we've seen from voter turnouts, lots of people don't give a shit and will happily sell their vote to the highest bidder.
  - pydry 6y ago
    And what's to stop the feds setting up 10 competing sites and then fining everybody who sold their votes 10x the amount they were hoping to get? Which of the 11 tor sites will you submit your receipt to now?
parliament32 6y ago
>After voting, you could also give every voter a "receipt" where they could go online and check in the public blockchain to confirm that their vote was counted successfully. The problem with verifiable voting has always been that it opens the market to vote-selling. If you can prove how you voted, your vote can be sold for a significant amount of money -- or worse, your employer insisting you vote a certain way, and asking for your receipt after. This won't work until there's a mechanism where you can confirm your vote while also having plausible deniability.
- rodgerd 6y ago
  Or, more likely, vote blackmail.
  - Terr_ 6y ago
    I think you mean extortion. Blackmail is more specific, and implies a threat to reveal a secret. For example, an employer who threatens to fire employees who "vote wrong" would not be blackmail.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  You simply wouldn't identify the person making the vote. You are assigned a random identifier that is actually publicly available. So if I vote and give you my identifier to prove how I voted, you have no way of verifying if I am giving you my actual receipt or just some other receipt from the publicly accessible register of voters. The only way to truly validate the vote would be to match the receipt id with the internally held ballot that has your pii on it.
  - parliament32 6y ago
    Then how do you prove x% of the voters for candidate A weren't just given the same identifier? This'd defeat the purpose of being able to verify your vote in the first place, something unique to you has to be in the record too.
    - 6y ago
SahAssar 6y ago
I think you're missing a few things: Votes should never be identifiable and the count should be verifiable. First of all: using somewhat public things like SSN, "numbers in your street address" and a credit card number is a terrible idea. All of those have been leaked and are present on things you present to identify yourself or pay. Also requiring a credit card or home to vote would almost certainly be unconstitutional. Getting a "receipt" is also problematic: You should never be able to prove you voted A over B or vice versa since that opens up ways to intimidate people to vote one way and coerce them to prove it. I'm not saying it's impossible but there are so many problems with electronic voting that I don't even know where to start. At least with physical ballots we can manually recount if we need. And that's before we even start talking about how current systems are basically swiss cheese for hacks, just look at the voting village for the last couple of defcons. Related (and amusing) links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
- wavefunction 6y ago
  The ballot itself could be a zk-SNARK written to a blockchain signed with a private key owned by the voter.
  - SahAssar 6y ago
    Sorry, I'm not well versed enough in zk-SNARK, can you explain how it solves the problems above? If it does do you think that you can make the general public trust/understand it enough to run a election?
  - wavefunction 6y ago
    Sorry can't reply to your reply but... Making the ballot a zk-SNARK[0] would allow it to be queried for validity of certain assertions like "Did this ballot contain a vote for Candidate A or Proposition B" without leaking the identity of the voter. The voter's private key could decrypt the entire ballot perhaps for the voter's verification or even as another verifiable assertion that the ballot was signed with the specific key. Perhaps there would be a key provided by the voting authority body as another verifiable assertion that would allow the voting authority body to verify the user for their purposes if required. I agree that the more difficult part of this would be encouraging adoption and supporting use. There are hardware keys like yubikeys or hardware crypto wallets that can be populated with voter-generated keys to be used in the voting process, and these hardware keys could be populated in a process similar to getting a driver's license perhaps, except not waiting for it to arrive in the mail. Perhaps you go into your local clerk's office and they have a one-time key generator that populates your hardware key. I definitely haven't fleshed this idea out beyond some basic musings. [0]https://z.cash/technology/zksnarks/ https://z.cash/technology/zksnarks/
dogma1138 6y ago
Electronic voting changes the threat model which opens the door for large scale voting fraud which is impossible with the current system. Also in the US you don’t have a single election, you have 50 individual elections all with different ballots and different rules, the federal government doesn’t run the elections in each state. This means that you’ll have 50 different systems. There is little that technology can do with a system that already provides transparency by having a physical hard copy of each vote cast and allowing essentially any citizen to become an observer.

totony 6y ago

This article is very poor in that it has no real argument as for why it's bad. Here's what it asserts: - We don't care about the speed of the results. That is trivially false, everyone is following the reporting, Trump is out there saying he won, people question the delays and suggest they may give time for bad actors to rig the vote. - It's too expensive - There is no backing to this claim except "it systems routinely go over budget" - It disregards secrecy as important - secrecy is a vital part of an election process. It allows people to freely have any opinion they want without consequence or fear of people forcing them to vote for someone else (violence or other). - Accessibility - I'm not sure how they can assert that we can't make e voting accessible? EDIT: For those downvoting, please do provide a reason why you disagree with what I said. Is any argument in that article actually strong?

greenduck 6y ago

Tom Scott still has the best argument against e-voting IMO [1]. Briefly: an election only counts if everybody can believe the results. Making an expert level understanding of CS a requirement to verify your voting system means that Joe Q. Average who doesn't hold a PhD (or maybe even a college degree) has to rely on spooky experts telling him what to believe. If I were in his shoes then I would have no confidence that I participated in a fair and valid election. We kind of live in a bubble here on HN where most people are sort of in the tech space and could take a weekend or two to understand blockchain. I think its easy to forget that most people don't have the required background to learn it easily (or would want to use up their time to understand it). I almost have a PhD in the hard sciences and I don't fully understand the finer details of block chain. I think I would have to write my own implementation to fully appreciate it. Simplicity and the ability to explain the system to every American is a requirement of any voting system. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs&t=12s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs&t=12s

trhway 6y ago
>Joe Q. Average who doesn't hold a PhD (or maybe even a college degree) has to rely on spooky experts telling him what to believe. The Joe is for example driving a car full of electronics and somehow he doesn't have issue trusting his life to it. And, if anything, i'm pretty sure that deep understanding of that car's electronics and software would make the Joe to only trust his car less (one can google the software expert's opinions during the Prius self-acceleration story)
- superwayne 6y ago
  I can see that the car works by getting safely from A to B, thousands of times. If my vote counted or not is not observable.
  - trhway 6y ago
    any e-voting system of course must make it observable. Otherwise it just wouldn't make any sense.
  - 6y ago

IndrekR 6y ago

I think it is time to implement things correctly in US as well. Closed unverifiable voting system is as good as an e-voting system as DocuSign is good as an e-signature system. There are proven mathematical ways that make sure, without using blockchain, that the votes and voters are correct [1]. Then again, I am biased as I am lucky enough to enjoy the benefits of well implemented electronic voting and signing system in Estonia. Source code for Estonian voting system is published in GitHub [2]. [1] http://research.cyber.ee/~jan/publ/mobileverification-ieee.pdf http://research.cyber.ee/~jan/publ/mobileverification-ieee.p... [2]https://github.com/vvk-ehk https://github.com/vvk-ehk

dogma1138 6y ago
Estonia has a National ID with a smart card on it. This isn’t possible for nations which do not want mandatory ID laws. It also then makes the ID card a good target which specifically the Estonian one was found to have quite a few issues. Lastly trust in a voting system isn’t just can someone alter the vote but how easy it would be to deny people from voting and any electronic voting system will be susceptible to a wide range of denial of service attacks, what’s worse that these systems are susceptible to denial of service attacks that could corrupt votes cast causing not only those votes to be cast out but making the entire system being suspect.

golemiprague 6y ago

For me it looks like voting with no ID or by mail is much more of a trash idea. I can't understand how you can verify who is voting in this type of system. Doing it electronically or not is the least of my concerns, it is the process in the US that is inherently wrong.

dmalvarado 6y ago

I am surprised that there is no digital option to preselect your candidates before going to the polling place. i.e. Make your choices, receive QR code. Go to polling place, scan, verify selections on voting machine, press big red button and walk out of there. If each vote took 1 minute instead of 10, would there still be a line? edit: Or if not shorter lines, maybe 5 voting machines instead of 20? or 4 poll workers instead of 10? Seems more efficient all around.

stretchwithme 6y ago

We never needed electronic voting to prevent the hanging chad issue. All we needed to do was help people properly encode their paper ballots. That can be done with open source software running on a PC connected to a punch card machine. We could also let voters confirm their choices with a punch card reader hooked up to another PC running separately developed software at the polling place. You can still the votes electronically. But also count the physical ballots. Two counts are better than one. Somebody woould have to change both to hide cheating. Record the raw ballot in a block at the same time to make it even harder. These are solvable problems. If we can keep cryptocurrency honest, we can do it with votes.

Aerroon 6y ago

I'm from Estonia and Estonia has an e-voting system. It seems to be relatively decent as far as decent can be, but I still don't like it. Estonia's government issued ID card has a chip on it, like a debit card. The card contains a private key. The card uses a two-factor authentication system: you have the physical card itself (with the private key) and 3 PIN codes. PIN1 along with the card is used to identify you. PIN2 along with the card can be used to give electronic signatures. A PUK code along with the card can be used to unblock the card if the user enters a PIN incorrectly 3 times in a row. The system is pretty convenient. It allows us to do things like online banking, give electronic signatures on documents (you put the file in a container and sign the container), and also electronically vote. Effectively, it's a way to electronically verify whether somebody is who they say they are, and this verification is backed by the government. It is convenient to electronically vote. Some time before election day people can cast their vote via an application on their PC. They can vote multiple times. Online voting ends before election day and anybody can go vote in person even if they've cast an electronic vote. The last vote cast counts. This makes buying votes ineffective, because a person could sell their vote any number of times to different candidates. After you vote a QR code appears in the application. You can read that QR code with your smartphone to check on your vote for 30 minutes or 1 hour after voting. The server side source code is open.[0] The votes get moved to a counting server and get counted. There are quite a few issues in this process as found by an independent audit.[1] (I really recommend reading it if you're interested in this topic.) However, most of those problems seem to be relatively unlikely or at least there's a good chance we would know that something is fishy. However, I don't like e-voting. I have three main problems with this system: 1. The system is opaque to the layman. The government can take every step to ensure transparency in the e-voting process, but it doesn't matter to the average person. An average person doesn't understand enough about how software and computers work to be able to tell whether foul-play was happening or not. The process of voting in person, counting those votes and tallying them up are much easier to understand. It's easier for an average person to tell whether the in-person voting process is being tampered with or not. I think this point alone makes e-voting a bad choice. 2. It relies on the security of the average user's devices. It's conceivable that a large scale malware attack could compromise the machine the user votes on and the device the user uses to verify their vote. It's unlikely, but Estonia is small - it can never put in the resources that a large country could. 3. It relies on the security of third party software and hardware. If consumer/enterprise hardware is compromised on a global scale, then that likely means that the e-voting system is vulnerable too. E-voting is more convenient, but ultimately I think that such convenience is overshadowed by the risk. In person voting in Estonia is very easy (at least in cities). It has never taken me more than 10 minutes from arriving at the voting location to leaving. If the goal was to just make voting more convenient, then they could've just added more voting booths and put them in supermarkets. [0] https://github.com/vvk-ehk https://github.com/vvk-ehk [1] https://estoniaevoting.org/findings/summary/ https://estoniaevoting.org/findings/summary/

6456457 6y ago

Throw opposition to voter ID laws (you know, the kind every country in Europe has) on the trash-heap with it. At this point Republicans mostly believe the Democrats have or are in the process of stealing the election, and they collectively will have little faith in presidential elections going forward until robust voter ID laws are put into effect. The arguments against these laws are underwhelming, given how often you need to show ID for other things, and lead Republicans to suspect Progressives want to stuff ballot boxes.