5 ms·

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 usi

by 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.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  Well, blockchain, mostly because it is simply a cryptographic way to confirm that data has not been tampered with and easily validate against other copies. If you simply make a database public, then it requires a bit more energy to validate copies. It would also require that anyone who wants to validate it has a complete copy of their own. Whereas with blockchain, you can merely take down a single hash at a certain timestamp and easily verify that hash later.
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.

by jjeaff 6y ago

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.
jjeaff 6y ago
Well, blockchain, mostly because it is simply a cryptographic way to confirm that data has not been tampered with and easily validate against other copies. If you simply make a database public, then it requires a bit more energy to validate copies. It would also require that anyone who wants to validate it has a complete copy of their own. Whereas with blockchain, you can merely take down a single hash at a certain timestamp and easily verify that hash later.

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.