10 ms·

USPS patent for reliable voting system secured with blockchain

63 points by capableweb 6y ago

lsb 6y ago
Proposals for such inoperable [perpetual motion] machines have become so common that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has made an official policy of refusing to grant patents for perpetual motion machines without a working model. The USPTO Manual of Patent Examining Practice states: With the exception of cases involving perpetual motion, a model is not ordinarily required by the Office to demonstrate the operability of a device. If operability of a device is questioned, the applicant must establish it to the satisfaction of the examiner, but he or she may choose his or her own way of so doing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion#Patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion#Patents
- bigbubba 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure blockchains don't violate the laws of physics, so providing a working prototype shouldn't be much challenge.
wpietri 6y ago
Bury it in the desert. Wear gloves. https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
- wpietri 6y ago
  As an aside, XKCD #404 is my favorite: https://xkcd.com/403/ https://xkcd.com/403/ https://xkcd.com/404/ https://xkcd.com/404/ https://xkcd.com/405/ https://xkcd.com/405/
  - overkalix 6y ago
    It took me multiple F5s to get it...
- jimmaswell 6y ago
  Short sighted and needlessly defeatist in my opinion. Some people would've had us ride horses forever because the first cars were dangerous.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    As far as the computer security experts I've talked to, it's pretty much the consensus. Computers are very fragile, and have been my whole career. How many of us here make good money just keeping up with all the patches and fixes and defenses needed to make sure a modern system stays safe? Of course, some deep technological revolution might change that eventually. But in that case we still shouldn't rush to shift to a digital-only elections system. Why? Because it doesn't just have to work. Voters have to have confidence in the system. And that system isn't just technical, it's social. Everybody understands paper. Everybody understand marking paper. Everybody understands manually counting marks on paper and adding up numbers. Further, everybody has intuitions on how to protect and defend that process by making sure the right people are present. People do generally accept machine counting of paper ballots, because they don't see that as much different, and because they know a manual count can be done if there are problems. However technically clever and perfect some blockchain system is, it just doesn't have the simplicity and robustness in the face of attack or failure that we need. And it especially doesn't provide the social validation of what is essentially a social result.
    - bigbubba 6y ago
      > Why? Because it doesn't just have to work. Voters have to have confidence in the system. And that system isn't just technical, it's social. I'd go even further and say that if voters believe in the system, it doesn't actually have to work. Belief in the system is the mechanism by which democracy provides stability. The election system actually working as advertised is only necessary to the extent that the system actually working is required to make people believe it works.
    - jimmaswell 6y ago
      We might not be ready right this instant but that's not a reason to not research the problem and make attempts to move forward. Something just seems wrong about sticking to paper forever. In my lifetime I should be able to vote from my phone in the middle of the ocean with satellite internet.
- rs999gti 6y ago
  Yeah still don't get it. We depend on computers for things that can literally kill us, but not voting? Seems like the argument against computer voting leaves the door open for bad actors.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  This is less about "computers" and more about the adversarial nature of the process. Airplanes and elevators have computers in them but the "adversary" is gravity, which doesn't update its "attacks" to adapt to your countermeasures. Voting systems don't just have to defend their "planes" against high winds and lightning, they also have to defend them against surface to air missiles and rogue pilots.
devwastaken 6y ago
As I understand it, You can't anonymize (remove) voter data and also validate that data. You're trusting the point of entry of the data where the ballot is submitted. Simply all the blockchain becomes is a record that X number of people voted for Y. Whoever controls the point of entry controls what is entered into the anonymized data, and by definition cannot validate against it.
- vmception 6y ago
  > You can't anonymize (remove) voter data and also validate that data. There are a variety of teams and projects working on that problem. I wouldn't say that limitation is really an absolute.
  - im3w1l 6y ago
    I think under fairly general assumptions, a purely digital voting system cannot work. But it may be possible to bypass those issues with a hybrid physical/digital system. Or it may be possible to construct a system that is unsound in theory but works decent in practice. I'm thinking about technologies like DRM and Proctoring. But deep fakery could become a threat to proctoring in the near future.
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  > You can't anonymize (remove) voter data and also validate that data. Sure you can. That's what the cryptographic field of zero-knowledge proofs is about. For example there's well developed protocols where every voter can verify that their vote was counted exactly once, anyone can verify that no non-authorized voters were counted, and perfect secrecy is preserved.
  - hatsunearu 6y ago
    You'd need homomorphic encryption to achieve this, not ZK.
    - sebmellen 6y ago
TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
There is nothing good a “blockchain” can do for an election that a simpler centralised system like certificate transparency logs can't, and in either case you'd have to sacrifice the secret ballot to provide any meaningful verifiability, making the whole exercise strictly worse than the existing system.
- tzs 6y ago
  You can have meaningful verifiability without giving up secrecy. See [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...
  - TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
    Oh, hmm, I guess there's interesting things that could be done with paper ballots combined with a digital system. I'm extremely skeptical of any completely digital system however.
  - catlifeonmars 6y ago
    Yes, you can, but not without additional complexity. Whether that additionally complexity is an acceptable tradeoff is an open question.
Someone1234 6y ago
We need to make voting simpler to understand for the average person, and each step to involve more people. Right now the systems are so convoluted that it gives a fertile bed for ignorance to grow, which can directly results in lower public trust in voting and or conspiracies. The electrification of voting (e.g. Diebold Election Systems) have only worsened that through a combination of questionable bidden processes and outright low competence. This takes complexity and multiplies it, then expects the public to "get it" when you show them the algorithms, and ask them to do the raw mathematics themselves. It is completely out of touch with the general public.
- mindslight 6y ago
  The easiest way to go about this would be to give up the requirement that votes are private. This would make the need for cryptography drop away completely, and trusted third parties mostly. Individual voters could verify that their votes were counted correctly, and everyone could verify that eg dead people didn't vote. I'm not saying this is a good policy, just a hard technical tradeoff of what would be required for verifiable voting without cryptography. It's an all or nothing proposition too. A hybrid system (opt in to make your vote public so it can be publicly verified) would create additional vote pools that would differ based on ideological preferences and thereby attract calls to disenfranchise, as we've seen for mail in voting.
  - arrosenberg 6y ago
    It's a universally bad policy. Public votes mean those with money will purchase them, as they have the ability to validate their investment. We have examples of for the general electorate pre-1885 and in Congress post-Watergate.
    - cocoa19 6y ago
      And plenty in our current times as well. Mexican politicians buy votes with a one time delivery of grocery bags or 20-50 dollar grocery store cards.
jimbob45 6y ago
As far as I’ve seen, paper ballots are the most secure, affordable, and understandable method of voting to embrace. Granted, we’re on HN so we all know not to trust technology. Does anyone have a counterargument to paper ballots? I know that there were some murmurings of fraud in the paper ballots this election but from what I’ve seen, paper ballots are head and shoulders above (hackable) electronic systems.
- tzs 6y ago
  We can get the best of both worlds: paper ballots that can be counted with inexpensive, already widely in use, optical scan systems. That gives you fast vote counting, with the ability to do a hand recount if needed. If you are clever about how you make the ballots, you can even get end to end verifiability, and you can publish the ballots so the anyone who wants can verify that the count was done correctly. See [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity
- Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  The main arguments against paper ballots are that they allow for marks that make the intent of the voter unclear and that they take more time and effort to tabulate. The latter point shouldn't be an issue due to the importance of voting to Democracy. Allocate the money required for counting and simply deal with the time it takes to tabulate, which isn't all that long. The former could be addressed by having ballot MARKING machines instead of voting machines. Some jurisdictions have already moved in this direction. With a ballot marking machine, you can use a device such as a touchscreen that then prints out a ballot with your selections on it. You verify the correctness of your votes on the ballot. If they are not correct, it is a spoiled ballot that you witness being destroyed before using the ballot marking machine again. If the ballot is correct, you turn it in just as you would a completed human marked ballot. Given the standardized printing of the ballots by the ballot marking machine, they should also be machine readable without bar codes or any other non human readable form. If there is a question about the accuracy of the machine count, a human count can be used to verify correctness. The real gain here is the elimination of ambiguity in voter intent and the elimination of ballots that only exist inside of a computer.
djsumdog 6y ago
Blockchains will remove one critical part of elections: secret ballots. Considering all the pure hater aims at all republican supporters, including those who contribute to campaigns, the secret ballot is incredibly important to preventing people from going to jail for their political views. What happened at Mozilla can happen because they are a private non-profit and can do what they want, but do we want this to happen to regular citizens for expressing their political rights in a representative democracy? The flip side, this election has seen larger election fraud combined with voter fraud, than we've seen since 2000 or JFK (and any mention of it gets you a nice little Orwellian Ministry of Truth label on your post on FB/Twitter/Reddit/etc.) It's so egregious and I wrote full post on it for those who are interested: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/the-return-of-american-corruption/ https://battlepenguin.com/politics/the-return-of-american-co... Our elections have always been a farce. In the past two decades, we still don't have open source election software that can be inspected, and we still don't have basic election transparency.
- amingilani 6y ago
  > The system separates voter identification and votes to ensure vote anonymity, and stores votes on a distributed ledger in a blockchain. Not all systems tie identify information to the vote itself. This is one such implementation.
- unknownkadath 6y ago
  It can be used that way, but it doesn't have to; If I understand correctly, putting the votes on a single blockchain would protect the tally the same way it protects against double-spend attacks.
- tmpz22 6y ago
  Not a single US court has accepted a case for fraud by the presidents legal team because as of yet there is ZERO evidence. Until there is credible evidence stop acting like a victim and pouncing at every conservative forum post making unfounded accusations.
  - djsumdog 6y ago
beervirus 6y ago
Patent application, not patent.
encom 6y ago
Guess it's time to link that Tom Scott video again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI Use paper and pencil. Anything more is for failures.
- mseidl 6y ago
  Voting should never , ever be electronic... If you wanted to sway an election with electronic voting you would just have to hit a few points versus going through the hassle of voting in person... Or even voting by mail. Plus, the problem is lazy, stupid humans. You could have the most secure system on the planet, but if the password is password then it's worthless. Social engineering is a HUGE thing. Look at defcon videos where they "hack" via pretending to be someone in the company and make a phone call. It happens so fast(minutes). Also, there's a video on electronic voting , it might be a vice video or jon Oliver... districts left voting machines easily accessible, not under lock and key, no cameras, nothing... https://youtu.be/svEuG_ekNT0 https://youtu.be/svEuG_ekNT0 America should do what Germany does with voting make the ballots easy to read/use, none of this stupid chad shit. There are big circles on our ballots to mark the vote, it's simple/clear. The xkcd comic sums it up perfectly too. https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
rs999gti 6y ago
Isn't this what Voatz is? It was used in UT for 2020.
lukev 6y ago
This is a terrible, terrible idea. 98% of the voting population has no clue how blockchains even work. And as we're seeing in realtime, if uninformed people don't like the result and don't understand the process, they will immediately attribute the results to fraud (this is bipartisan, btw... remember the Russian hacking of voter systems in 2016?) Election systems need to be simple and transparent above all else, and old fashioned paper ballots that can be counted and audited by hand (if necessary) are the best way to achieve that. Any automated system, whether using blockchain or the existing electronic voting systems, is hopelessly opaque and serves only to decrease confidence in our democracy.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  > if uninformed people don't like the result and don't understand the process I agree that we should make the process simple and transparent so that others can verify it, but not because we want the truth-denying anti-science megalomaniac to concede (they won't in the face of hard truth and facts); but because we can have other experts in the field peer-review it.
  - roywiggins 6y ago
    It's both. Reasonable people would have good reason to distrust a voting system that you'd need a graduate degree to understand the mathematical underpinnings of.
- GoldenMonkey 6y ago
  This is non-sensical. Right now, there are voting systems on computer and on paper. All of them are fraudulent. And auditing them are difficult if not impossible. Time vs money. Blockchains provide a mechanism to audit and eliminate fraud. For example, by only allowing one vote per person. And allowing the person who voted, to confirm their vote was not changed or tampered with. Paper ballots guarantee nothing.
  - lukev 6y ago
    You seem to be starting from the prior position that existing voting systems are fraudulent. This is not the case (at least for paper ones, I too am skeptical of purely electronic voting systems.) Both initial counting, recounting and auditing is quite straightforward. For example, Risk Limiting Audits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit) are easy to do and provide extremely high degrees of mathematical certainty that an election was not tampered with.
Daniel_sk 6y ago
Very very bad idea. We just have Trump shouting "stop the count" and "illegal votes", imagine how this could go wrong with blockchain.
M2Ys4U 6y ago
Just remember: you don't have to prove something actually works, let alone that it's a good idea, to get a patent on it.
nullc 6y ago
Voting needs a blockchain like a fish needs a bicycle. There are many challenges in voting systems. Blockchains address none of them and, in fact, without great care they could easily obliterate election security-- enabling coercion and vote buying. A true blockchain would also degrade security in other ways. Anyone pushing blockchains for voting are extremely confused by the technology, -- e.g. calling any cryptographic audit log a "blockchain"-- at best, or exploiting buzzword hype to defraud you, at worst. None of the possibilities suggest that they have a system you should want to adopt.
- catlifeonmars 6y ago
  I have an idea for a bicycle-based blockchain implementation for elections taking place in coral reefs.
babyshake 6y ago
Without a major overhaul of the entire voting system, it seems that computer vision could assist with observation. Let's say both parties can have their own tamper resistant devices that can record their own counts of votes from a portion of ballots with identifying information removed. Either party can challenge the recorded result from a ballot and must make a deposit that is not returned if their challenge is not successful. The whole idea of having multiple humans standing around watching every ballot seems like it's unfeasible, and presents the opportunity to cast doubt on the process.
agentultra 6y ago
I’m not an expert here but isn’t security by institutional bureaucracy a feature here? First, it’s a system that people without any degrees can understand and execute without the aid of computers. Trust involves far more than cryptographic trust: understanding how the system works and that it is being carried out faithfully is also important: how do people do that when not only is the system opaque but the means of executing it is also a black box? Second it’s really difficult to attack. The physical aspect and coordination required makes it difficult to pull off and harder to do quietly without anyone noticing.
fastball 6y ago
We don't need blockchain, but some cryptographic ideas that have become more popular in recent years thanks to blockchain would be great (mainly pubkey crypto). 1. Issue everyone a cryptographic signature card with a private key on it. 2. This card has a pin and allows the user to digitally sign any document with a private key associated with that citizen/resident. 3. This private key never leaves the card. Overall, this is fairly similar to how hardware wallets for blockchains work. 4. For voting, you can either download your ballot online, or go in person to a voting booth. 5. You fill out your digital ballot, then sign it with your private key / card (again, either on your own computer or a ballot box machine does this for you), and your signed ballot is uploaded to a central repository. This central repository is not a blockchain, it is merely a place that has each users public key. When you need to count the votes, you validate everyone's ballots with public keys and tally them in a second. 6. As proof you have voted, the machine you uploaded your ballot to in turn sends you a payload which has been signed with your public key, and therefore can only be decrypted again using your private key card. This is how you know your vote will be counted. [Pros] - Replaces the need for mail-in voting and worrying about ballots arriving at some arbitrary election deadline. A citizen with their auth card can vote from anywhere in the world. Elections during crises would be a non-issue (unless the crisis brings down the internet, though I doubt a crisis that brings down the internet would leave a postal system unscathed – esp. once Starlink is live). - All votes can be counted and re-counted in seconds. - Fraud seems difficult with this system. You would either need to compromise the auth card issuing authority (difficult and assuredly traceable, though still a SPoF) or steal people's cards and know their PINs. Cards could obviously be canceled / reissued with a high-level of identity verification. - The auth card becomes your new identity provider for basically every authentication you need (getting a bank account, signing a document, etc) and is much, much superior to the current status quo where the validation is either a digital (handwriting) signature or "what is your address and SSN?". [Cons] - You need to give everyone a card. Not a big deal because we already are dishing out SSN cards, DLs, passports, birth certs, etc without too much difficulty. Also you'll need to give a card terminal[1] to anyone who wants to do things from home. - You need to be able to interact with digital technology. Honestly this shouldn't be much of a problem. If you can use a credit card, you should be able to use this digital auth card. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Barclays_Pinsentry_5920.jpg/487px-Barclays_Pinsentry_5920.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Ba...
krupan 6y ago
With mail-in voting, registered voters are mailed a ballot, it is filled out by the voter, and mailed back in. People are commenting that you can’t verify or anonymize digital voting, but with blockchain voting, you could mail each voter a “wallet” private key (probably a QR code). Each “wallet” contains one vote, and voters create a transaction that sends their vote to the “wallet” for the candidate they are voting for. The private keys would be randomly generated and not recorded by anyone, so anonymity would be preserved. Normal blockchain double-spend protections would prevent double voting. Am I missing anything?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- krupan 6y ago
  I thought it would go without saying, but now I think I should say, with this system it’s transparent for everyone to see the transactions and where the votes went. Individuals could easily see that their vote was counted. The count would be instantaneous. I guess one downside would be that everyone could see a running tally of the votes as they happen. Is that really a big problem?
- raziel2701 6y ago
  Sounds very difficult to explain and unnecessary. Paper voting is easy to understand and transparent. This is a solution looking for a problem, we're trading simple, easy to understand paper ballots for complicated blockchain solutions whose benefits are....what are the benefits again?
  - redisman 6y ago
    Blockchain!
  - krupan 6y ago
    I mean, if you are correct that there really are no problems with paper voting, then great. That's not what I've been hearing ever since Bush vs. Gore, but I'll admit I haven't looked at it closely myself
solarkraft 6y ago
Congratulations. Terrible idea. Mandatory video (yes, the one by Tom Scott): https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs
chuckSu 6y ago
I’m still waiting for blockchain to solve the worlds problems like promised or maybe just one problem at least. This is not that problem
ddingus 6y ago
This is an attempt to solve a human problem with a technical solution. Our election trouble in the US boils down to corruption, and I will be blunt: The people responsible for trustworthy elections aren't interested. Where they are, simple, time tested, production proven ways and means work just fine and are very robust. Trust starts with people being involved in the civics. Every layer of complexity comes with both a barrier to trust and an opportunity to exploit the process to control the election outcome. Electronic voting started out this way. So far, no scheme has even made economic sense. At any given time and population size, there are always people available for the civics. Paper has one property no electronic system has presented to date: The chain of trust between voter intent and the record of their vote is unbroken. When we mark media, we record a direct expression of voter intent and that expression is used directly to determine the final tally, and with that, the election outcome. Electronic votes are votes by proxy. Voters must trust the tech to interpret and maintain the accuracy of their vote intent. This, by nature, is untrustworthy given we don't actually need to vote by proxy in the vast majority of cases. This is all exacerbated by voter anonymity and freedom to vote or not. Having both of those in play highlight the dynamic nature of electronic records. Flat out, this problem is not well aligned to technology. Getting people involved and insuring elections embody these ideas to the maximum possible is how we run trustworthy elections: --Freedom to vote or not. --Anonymity, no vote shall be personally identifiable to the person who cast it. --Transparency. The law, means, ways, methods, shall be visible to all impacted by the election. It should be simple to understand how an expression of voter intent is recorded and followed through to the final tally. --Oversight. Not only must the law, process means and methods allow for public involvement, this must be encouraged and actually done and discussed. Legitimacy is made or broken here. These are all human problems, not technological ones. Human solutions are in use all over the world. The US stands fairly unique in both its general denial about the state of its elections and ongoing efforts to fix human problems with ever increasingly complex technology that does not get at the root causes. People need to be involved. The process needs to be simple, robust, records available, human readable in a court of law and leaders need to lead by example and cultivate trust and people involvement.
- ddingus 6y ago
  Before you read this, know it is the product of many discussions with reformers, legislators and some of my own State history. This information is not popular, but it is solid. Rebuttals welcome and encouraged! Now for the rough news: Reform does not begin with the losers. They lost and that undermines their position and standing to demand change. While their incentive to reform is high, driven by the need to seek power, how just their arguments are is put into question by what the winners can always argue is a general failure to appeal to the people. Losers can take a case to the people however. When said case is seen as an overall gain, it has a solid chance to succeed. (True whether their intent is just and true or self serving, nefarious.) Winners will suggest the remedy for losers is to perform better in the next election and that will carry great weight and serve as a basis to undermine reform efforts seen to also undermine the legitimacy. Winners have a low incentive to reform as said reforms can put their currently successful path to power into jeopardy. They also understand legitimacy is core to their power and standing as legislators. If they question the process, they question their own legitimacy. On this point, democracy depends strongly on legitimacy. No one holding power wants the overall process legitimacy undermined. People consent to governance in democratic society. Legitimacy is the core holding things together. So, what is the path? Generally speaking, courts are reluctant to legislate process changes. From their POV, they can sort out an election that needs it and will do so under the current process. The courts can affirm a successful reform, but cannot generally initiate one. A better process is a political problem and the courts will make it clear new law / process originates from the politics, not the bench. (I am ignoring activist courts here and those arguments have merit, but none of that is truly germane to election reform.) This does not leave much! Reform comes from the winners, people currently holding power. Their power may be democratic. Prime example is they won their election. It may be a matter of process. Succession is a prime example. They end up in power because someone else fell out of power somehow. (This does put an additional emphasis on cultivating legitimacy into play, just saying.) It may be the result of conflict too. A coup, revolt sufficient to topple prior regime, you get the idea. In all cases, winners have legitimacy as a primary concern and will be extremely reluctant to put that into question. Reform arguments are more potent when existing power and legitimacy are considered and threats marginalized. Conclusion: Successful election reform happens when the winners can propose a solution that does not undermine legitimacy and presents a mutual benefit for themselves and those voters they hold power over. The people, depending on law in their state, can also propose election reform to be generally adopted. This is the primary path for losers reform efforts. It garners legitimacy and can also be used to augment campaigns. There are some successes! Maine abandoned first past the post voting. Oregon adopted vote by mail with good overall results. Other states, Colorado, Washington... have adopted it for similar reasons and have seen similar positive outcomes. Anyone interested in election reform would be wise to study past reform efforts that improved democracy. Notably, perception of reduction in democracy, trust, legitimacy are by far the dominant outcome for electronic elections. Successful arguments include: Better elections = better politics = better policy = better lives. Improved public involvement = reduction in fraud and fraud perception = greater trust = more legitimacy. On that point, reform efforts aimed at greater participation can also mean more successful GOTV. This can mean consent perception is higher, legitimacy higher, difficult policy easier to live with.
vaccinator 6y ago
It'd be nice to have a system where democrats cant enter 10x the vote count: https://factcheck.afp.com/human-error-michigan-county-vote-tally-sparks-claims-election-fraud https://factcheck.afp.com/human-error-michigan-county-vote-t...
nikolay 6y ago
No bullchain, please! There are better and simpler systems using public key cryptography!

63 points by capableweb 6y ago

lsb 6y ago

Proposals for such inoperable [perpetual motion] machines have become so common that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has made an official policy of refusing to grant patents for perpetual motion machines without a working model. The USPTO Manual of Patent Examining Practice states: With the exception of cases involving perpetual motion, a model is not ordinarily required by the Office to demonstrate the operability of a device. If operability of a device is questioned, the applicant must establish it to the satisfaction of the examiner, but he or she may choose his or her own way of so doing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion#Patents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion#Patents

bigbubba 6y ago
I'm pretty sure blockchains don't violate the laws of physics, so providing a working prototype shouldn't be much challenge.

wpietri 6y ago

Bury it in the desert. Wear gloves. https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/

wpietri 6y ago
As an aside, XKCD #404 is my favorite: https://xkcd.com/403/ https://xkcd.com/403/ https://xkcd.com/404/ https://xkcd.com/404/ https://xkcd.com/405/ https://xkcd.com/405/
- overkalix 6y ago
  It took me multiple F5s to get it...
jimmaswell 6y ago
Short sighted and needlessly defeatist in my opinion. Some people would've had us ride horses forever because the first cars were dangerous.
- wpietri 6y ago
  As far as the computer security experts I've talked to, it's pretty much the consensus. Computers are very fragile, and have been my whole career. How many of us here make good money just keeping up with all the patches and fixes and defenses needed to make sure a modern system stays safe? Of course, some deep technological revolution might change that eventually. But in that case we still shouldn't rush to shift to a digital-only elections system. Why? Because it doesn't just have to work. Voters have to have confidence in the system. And that system isn't just technical, it's social. Everybody understands paper. Everybody understand marking paper. Everybody understands manually counting marks on paper and adding up numbers. Further, everybody has intuitions on how to protect and defend that process by making sure the right people are present. People do generally accept machine counting of paper ballots, because they don't see that as much different, and because they know a manual count can be done if there are problems. However technically clever and perfect some blockchain system is, it just doesn't have the simplicity and robustness in the face of attack or failure that we need. And it especially doesn't provide the social validation of what is essentially a social result.
  - bigbubba 6y ago
    > Why? Because it doesn't just have to work. Voters have to have confidence in the system. And that system isn't just technical, it's social. I'd go even further and say that if voters believe in the system, it doesn't actually have to work. Belief in the system is the mechanism by which democracy provides stability. The election system actually working as advertised is only necessary to the extent that the system actually working is required to make people believe it works.
  - jimmaswell 6y ago
    We might not be ready right this instant but that's not a reason to not research the problem and make attempts to move forward. Something just seems wrong about sticking to paper forever. In my lifetime I should be able to vote from my phone in the middle of the ocean with satellite internet.
rs999gti 6y ago
Yeah still don't get it. We depend on computers for things that can literally kill us, but not voting? Seems like the argument against computer voting leaves the door open for bad actors.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
This is less about "computers" and more about the adversarial nature of the process. Airplanes and elevators have computers in them but the "adversary" is gravity, which doesn't update its "attacks" to adapt to your countermeasures. Voting systems don't just have to defend their "planes" against high winds and lightning, they also have to defend them against surface to air missiles and rogue pilots.

devwastaken 6y ago

As I understand it, You can't anonymize (remove) voter data and also validate that data. You're trusting the point of entry of the data where the ballot is submitted. Simply all the blockchain becomes is a record that X number of people voted for Y. Whoever controls the point of entry controls what is entered into the anonymized data, and by definition cannot validate against it.

vmception 6y ago
> You can't anonymize (remove) voter data and also validate that data. There are a variety of teams and projects working on that problem. I wouldn't say that limitation is really an absolute.
- im3w1l 6y ago
  I think under fairly general assumptions, a purely digital voting system cannot work. But it may be possible to bypass those issues with a hybrid physical/digital system. Or it may be possible to construct a system that is unsound in theory but works decent in practice. I'm thinking about technologies like DRM and Proctoring. But deep fakery could become a threat to proctoring in the near future.
dcolkitt 6y ago
> You can't anonymize (remove) voter data and also validate that data. Sure you can. That's what the cryptographic field of zero-knowledge proofs is about. For example there's well developed protocols where every voter can verify that their vote was counted exactly once, anyone can verify that no non-authorized voters were counted, and perfect secrecy is preserved.
- hatsunearu 6y ago
  You'd need homomorphic encryption to achieve this, not ZK.
  - sebmellen 6y ago

TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago

There is nothing good a “blockchain” can do for an election that a simpler centralised system like certificate transparency logs can't, and in either case you'd have to sacrifice the secret ballot to provide any meaningful verifiability, making the whole exercise strictly worse than the existing system.

tzs 6y ago
You can have meaningful verifiability without giving up secrecy. See [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
  Oh, hmm, I guess there's interesting things that could be done with paper ballots combined with a digital system. I'm extremely skeptical of any completely digital system however.
- catlifeonmars 6y ago
  Yes, you can, but not without additional complexity. Whether that additionally complexity is an acceptable tradeoff is an open question.

Someone1234 6y ago

We need to make voting simpler to understand for the average person, and each step to involve more people. Right now the systems are so convoluted that it gives a fertile bed for ignorance to grow, which can directly results in lower public trust in voting and or conspiracies. The electrification of voting (e.g. Diebold Election Systems) have only worsened that through a combination of questionable bidden processes and outright low competence. This takes complexity and multiplies it, then expects the public to "get it" when you show them the algorithms, and ask them to do the raw mathematics themselves. It is completely out of touch with the general public.

mindslight 6y ago
The easiest way to go about this would be to give up the requirement that votes are private. This would make the need for cryptography drop away completely, and trusted third parties mostly. Individual voters could verify that their votes were counted correctly, and everyone could verify that eg dead people didn't vote. I'm not saying this is a good policy, just a hard technical tradeoff of what would be required for verifiable voting without cryptography. It's an all or nothing proposition too. A hybrid system (opt in to make your vote public so it can be publicly verified) would create additional vote pools that would differ based on ideological preferences and thereby attract calls to disenfranchise, as we've seen for mail in voting.
- arrosenberg 6y ago
  It's a universally bad policy. Public votes mean those with money will purchase them, as they have the ability to validate their investment. We have examples of for the general electorate pre-1885 and in Congress post-Watergate.
  - cocoa19 6y ago
    And plenty in our current times as well. Mexican politicians buy votes with a one time delivery of grocery bags or 20-50 dollar grocery store cards.

jimbob45 6y ago

As far as I’ve seen, paper ballots are the most secure, affordable, and understandable method of voting to embrace. Granted, we’re on HN so we all know not to trust technology. Does anyone have a counterargument to paper ballots? I know that there were some murmurings of fraud in the paper ballots this election but from what I’ve seen, paper ballots are head and shoulders above (hackable) electronic systems.

tzs 6y ago
We can get the best of both worlds: paper ballots that can be counted with inexpensive, already widely in use, optical scan systems. That gives you fast vote counting, with the ability to do a hand recount if needed. If you are clever about how you make the ballots, you can even get end to end verifiability, and you can publish the ballots so the anyone who wants can verify that the count was done correctly. See [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity
Mountain_Skies 6y ago
The main arguments against paper ballots are that they allow for marks that make the intent of the voter unclear and that they take more time and effort to tabulate. The latter point shouldn't be an issue due to the importance of voting to Democracy. Allocate the money required for counting and simply deal with the time it takes to tabulate, which isn't all that long. The former could be addressed by having ballot MARKING machines instead of voting machines. Some jurisdictions have already moved in this direction. With a ballot marking machine, you can use a device such as a touchscreen that then prints out a ballot with your selections on it. You verify the correctness of your votes on the ballot. If they are not correct, it is a spoiled ballot that you witness being destroyed before using the ballot marking machine again. If the ballot is correct, you turn it in just as you would a completed human marked ballot. Given the standardized printing of the ballots by the ballot marking machine, they should also be machine readable without bar codes or any other non human readable form. If there is a question about the accuracy of the machine count, a human count can be used to verify correctness. The real gain here is the elimination of ambiguity in voter intent and the elimination of ballots that only exist inside of a computer.

djsumdog 6y ago

Blockchains will remove one critical part of elections: secret ballots. Considering all the pure hater aims at all republican supporters, including those who contribute to campaigns, the secret ballot is incredibly important to preventing people from going to jail for their political views. What happened at Mozilla can happen because they are a private non-profit and can do what they want, but do we want this to happen to regular citizens for expressing their political rights in a representative democracy? The flip side, this election has seen larger election fraud combined with voter fraud, than we've seen since 2000 or JFK (and any mention of it gets you a nice little Orwellian Ministry of Truth label on your post on FB/Twitter/Reddit/etc.) It's so egregious and I wrote full post on it for those who are interested: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/the-return-of-american-corruption/ https://battlepenguin.com/politics/the-return-of-american-co... Our elections have always been a farce. In the past two decades, we still don't have open source election software that can be inspected, and we still don't have basic election transparency.

amingilani 6y ago
> The system separates voter identification and votes to ensure vote anonymity, and stores votes on a distributed ledger in a blockchain. Not all systems tie identify information to the vote itself. This is one such implementation.
unknownkadath 6y ago
It can be used that way, but it doesn't have to; If I understand correctly, putting the votes on a single blockchain would protect the tally the same way it protects against double-spend attacks.
tmpz22 6y ago
Not a single US court has accepted a case for fraud by the presidents legal team because as of yet there is ZERO evidence. Until there is credible evidence stop acting like a victim and pouncing at every conservative forum post making unfounded accusations.
- djsumdog 6y ago

beervirus 6y ago

Patent application, not patent.

encom 6y ago

Guess it's time to link that Tom Scott video again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI Use paper and pencil. Anything more is for failures.

mseidl 6y ago
Voting should never , ever be electronic... If you wanted to sway an election with electronic voting you would just have to hit a few points versus going through the hassle of voting in person... Or even voting by mail. Plus, the problem is lazy, stupid humans. You could have the most secure system on the planet, but if the password is password then it's worthless. Social engineering is a HUGE thing. Look at defcon videos where they "hack" via pretending to be someone in the company and make a phone call. It happens so fast(minutes). Also, there's a video on electronic voting , it might be a vice video or jon Oliver... districts left voting machines easily accessible, not under lock and key, no cameras, nothing... https://youtu.be/svEuG_ekNT0 https://youtu.be/svEuG_ekNT0 America should do what Germany does with voting make the ballots easy to read/use, none of this stupid chad shit. There are big circles on our ballots to mark the vote, it's simple/clear. The xkcd comic sums it up perfectly too. https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/

rs999gti 6y ago

Isn't this what Voatz is? It was used in UT for 2020.

lukev 6y ago

This is a terrible, terrible idea. 98% of the voting population has no clue how blockchains even work. And as we're seeing in realtime, if uninformed people don't like the result and don't understand the process, they will immediately attribute the results to fraud (this is bipartisan, btw... remember the Russian hacking of voter systems in 2016?) Election systems need to be simple and transparent above all else, and old fashioned paper ballots that can be counted and audited by hand (if necessary) are the best way to achieve that. Any automated system, whether using blockchain or the existing electronic voting systems, is hopelessly opaque and serves only to decrease confidence in our democracy.

systemvoltage 6y ago
> if uninformed people don't like the result and don't understand the process I agree that we should make the process simple and transparent so that others can verify it, but not because we want the truth-denying anti-science megalomaniac to concede (they won't in the face of hard truth and facts); but because we can have other experts in the field peer-review it.
- roywiggins 6y ago
  It's both. Reasonable people would have good reason to distrust a voting system that you'd need a graduate degree to understand the mathematical underpinnings of.
GoldenMonkey 6y ago
This is non-sensical. Right now, there are voting systems on computer and on paper. All of them are fraudulent. And auditing them are difficult if not impossible. Time vs money. Blockchains provide a mechanism to audit and eliminate fraud. For example, by only allowing one vote per person. And allowing the person who voted, to confirm their vote was not changed or tampered with. Paper ballots guarantee nothing.
- lukev 6y ago
  You seem to be starting from the prior position that existing voting systems are fraudulent. This is not the case (at least for paper ones, I too am skeptical of purely electronic voting systems.) Both initial counting, recounting and auditing is quite straightforward. For example, Risk Limiting Audits (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk-limiting_audit) are easy to do and provide extremely high degrees of mathematical certainty that an election was not tampered with.

Daniel_sk 6y ago

Very very bad idea. We just have Trump shouting "stop the count" and "illegal votes", imagine how this could go wrong with blockchain.

M2Ys4U 6y ago

Just remember: you don't have to prove something actually works, let alone that it's a good idea, to get a patent on it.

nullc 6y ago

Voting needs a blockchain like a fish needs a bicycle. There are many challenges in voting systems. Blockchains address none of them and, in fact, without great care they could easily obliterate election security-- enabling coercion and vote buying. A true blockchain would also degrade security in other ways. Anyone pushing blockchains for voting are extremely confused by the technology, -- e.g. calling any cryptographic audit log a "blockchain"-- at best, or exploiting buzzword hype to defraud you, at worst. None of the possibilities suggest that they have a system you should want to adopt.

catlifeonmars 6y ago
I have an idea for a bicycle-based blockchain implementation for elections taking place in coral reefs.

babyshake 6y ago

Without a major overhaul of the entire voting system, it seems that computer vision could assist with observation. Let's say both parties can have their own tamper resistant devices that can record their own counts of votes from a portion of ballots with identifying information removed. Either party can challenge the recorded result from a ballot and must make a deposit that is not returned if their challenge is not successful. The whole idea of having multiple humans standing around watching every ballot seems like it's unfeasible, and presents the opportunity to cast doubt on the process.

agentultra 6y ago

I’m not an expert here but isn’t security by institutional bureaucracy a feature here? First, it’s a system that people without any degrees can understand and execute without the aid of computers. Trust involves far more than cryptographic trust: understanding how the system works and that it is being carried out faithfully is also important: how do people do that when not only is the system opaque but the means of executing it is also a black box? Second it’s really difficult to attack. The physical aspect and coordination required makes it difficult to pull off and harder to do quietly without anyone noticing.

fastball 6y ago

We don't need blockchain, but some cryptographic ideas that have become more popular in recent years thanks to blockchain would be great (mainly pubkey crypto). 1. Issue everyone a cryptographic signature card with a private key on it. 2. This card has a pin and allows the user to digitally sign any document with a private key associated with that citizen/resident. 3. This private key never leaves the card. Overall, this is fairly similar to how hardware wallets for blockchains work. 4. For voting, you can either download your ballot online, or go in person to a voting booth. 5. You fill out your digital ballot, then sign it with your private key / card (again, either on your own computer or a ballot box machine does this for you), and your signed ballot is uploaded to a central repository. This central repository is not a blockchain, it is merely a place that has each users public key. When you need to count the votes, you validate everyone's ballots with public keys and tally them in a second. 6. As proof you have voted, the machine you uploaded your ballot to in turn sends you a payload which has been signed with your public key, and therefore can only be decrypted again using your private key card. This is how you know your vote will be counted. [Pros] - Replaces the need for mail-in voting and worrying about ballots arriving at some arbitrary election deadline. A citizen with their auth card can vote from anywhere in the world. Elections during crises would be a non-issue (unless the crisis brings down the internet, though I doubt a crisis that brings down the internet would leave a postal system unscathed – esp. once Starlink is live). - All votes can be counted and re-counted in seconds. - Fraud seems difficult with this system. You would either need to compromise the auth card issuing authority (difficult and assuredly traceable, though still a SPoF) or steal people's cards and know their PINs. Cards could obviously be canceled / reissued with a high-level of identity verification. - The auth card becomes your new identity provider for basically every authentication you need (getting a bank account, signing a document, etc) and is much, much superior to the current status quo where the validation is either a digital (handwriting) signature or "what is your address and SSN?". [Cons] - You need to give everyone a card. Not a big deal because we already are dishing out SSN cards, DLs, passports, birth certs, etc without too much difficulty. Also you'll need to give a card terminal[1] to anyone who wants to do things from home. - You need to be able to interact with digital technology. Honestly this shouldn't be much of a problem. If you can use a credit card, you should be able to use this digital auth card. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Barclays_Pinsentry_5920.jpg/487px-Barclays_Pinsentry_5920.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Ba...

krupan 6y ago

With mail-in voting, registered voters are mailed a ballot, it is filled out by the voter, and mailed back in. People are commenting that you can’t verify or anonymize digital voting, but with blockchain voting, you could mail each voter a “wallet” private key (probably a QR code). Each “wallet” contains one vote, and voters create a transaction that sends their vote to the “wallet” for the candidate they are voting for. The private keys would be randomly generated and not recorded by anyone, so anonymity would be preserved. Normal blockchain double-spend protections would prevent double voting. Am I missing anything?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
krupan 6y ago
I thought it would go without saying, but now I think I should say, with this system it’s transparent for everyone to see the transactions and where the votes went. Individuals could easily see that their vote was counted. The count would be instantaneous. I guess one downside would be that everyone could see a running tally of the votes as they happen. Is that really a big problem?
raziel2701 6y ago
Sounds very difficult to explain and unnecessary. Paper voting is easy to understand and transparent. This is a solution looking for a problem, we're trading simple, easy to understand paper ballots for complicated blockchain solutions whose benefits are....what are the benefits again?
- redisman 6y ago
  Blockchain!
- krupan 6y ago
  I mean, if you are correct that there really are no problems with paper voting, then great. That's not what I've been hearing ever since Bush vs. Gore, but I'll admit I haven't looked at it closely myself

solarkraft 6y ago

Congratulations. Terrible idea. Mandatory video (yes, the one by Tom Scott): https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs https://youtu.be/LkH2r-sNjQs

chuckSu 6y ago

I’m still waiting for blockchain to solve the worlds problems like promised or maybe just one problem at least. This is not that problem

ddingus 6y ago

This is an attempt to solve a human problem with a technical solution. Our election trouble in the US boils down to corruption, and I will be blunt: The people responsible for trustworthy elections aren't interested. Where they are, simple, time tested, production proven ways and means work just fine and are very robust. Trust starts with people being involved in the civics. Every layer of complexity comes with both a barrier to trust and an opportunity to exploit the process to control the election outcome. Electronic voting started out this way. So far, no scheme has even made economic sense. At any given time and population size, there are always people available for the civics. Paper has one property no electronic system has presented to date: The chain of trust between voter intent and the record of their vote is unbroken. When we mark media, we record a direct expression of voter intent and that expression is used directly to determine the final tally, and with that, the election outcome. Electronic votes are votes by proxy. Voters must trust the tech to interpret and maintain the accuracy of their vote intent. This, by nature, is untrustworthy given we don't actually need to vote by proxy in the vast majority of cases. This is all exacerbated by voter anonymity and freedom to vote or not. Having both of those in play highlight the dynamic nature of electronic records. Flat out, this problem is not well aligned to technology. Getting people involved and insuring elections embody these ideas to the maximum possible is how we run trustworthy elections: --Freedom to vote or not. --Anonymity, no vote shall be personally identifiable to the person who cast it. --Transparency. The law, means, ways, methods, shall be visible to all impacted by the election. It should be simple to understand how an expression of voter intent is recorded and followed through to the final tally. --Oversight. Not only must the law, process means and methods allow for public involvement, this must be encouraged and actually done and discussed. Legitimacy is made or broken here. These are all human problems, not technological ones. Human solutions are in use all over the world. The US stands fairly unique in both its general denial about the state of its elections and ongoing efforts to fix human problems with ever increasingly complex technology that does not get at the root causes. People need to be involved. The process needs to be simple, robust, records available, human readable in a court of law and leaders need to lead by example and cultivate trust and people involvement.

ddingus 6y ago
Before you read this, know it is the product of many discussions with reformers, legislators and some of my own State history. This information is not popular, but it is solid. Rebuttals welcome and encouraged! Now for the rough news: Reform does not begin with the losers. They lost and that undermines their position and standing to demand change. While their incentive to reform is high, driven by the need to seek power, how just their arguments are is put into question by what the winners can always argue is a general failure to appeal to the people. Losers can take a case to the people however. When said case is seen as an overall gain, it has a solid chance to succeed. (True whether their intent is just and true or self serving, nefarious.) Winners will suggest the remedy for losers is to perform better in the next election and that will carry great weight and serve as a basis to undermine reform efforts seen to also undermine the legitimacy. Winners have a low incentive to reform as said reforms can put their currently successful path to power into jeopardy. They also understand legitimacy is core to their power and standing as legislators. If they question the process, they question their own legitimacy. On this point, democracy depends strongly on legitimacy. No one holding power wants the overall process legitimacy undermined. People consent to governance in democratic society. Legitimacy is the core holding things together. So, what is the path? Generally speaking, courts are reluctant to legislate process changes. From their POV, they can sort out an election that needs it and will do so under the current process. The courts can affirm a successful reform, but cannot generally initiate one. A better process is a political problem and the courts will make it clear new law / process originates from the politics, not the bench. (I am ignoring activist courts here and those arguments have merit, but none of that is truly germane to election reform.) This does not leave much! Reform comes from the winners, people currently holding power. Their power may be democratic. Prime example is they won their election. It may be a matter of process. Succession is a prime example. They end up in power because someone else fell out of power somehow. (This does put an additional emphasis on cultivating legitimacy into play, just saying.) It may be the result of conflict too. A coup, revolt sufficient to topple prior regime, you get the idea. In all cases, winners have legitimacy as a primary concern and will be extremely reluctant to put that into question. Reform arguments are more potent when existing power and legitimacy are considered and threats marginalized. Conclusion: Successful election reform happens when the winners can propose a solution that does not undermine legitimacy and presents a mutual benefit for themselves and those voters they hold power over. The people, depending on law in their state, can also propose election reform to be generally adopted. This is the primary path for losers reform efforts. It garners legitimacy and can also be used to augment campaigns. There are some successes! Maine abandoned first past the post voting. Oregon adopted vote by mail with good overall results. Other states, Colorado, Washington... have adopted it for similar reasons and have seen similar positive outcomes. Anyone interested in election reform would be wise to study past reform efforts that improved democracy. Notably, perception of reduction in democracy, trust, legitimacy are by far the dominant outcome for electronic elections. Successful arguments include: Better elections = better politics = better policy = better lives. Improved public involvement = reduction in fraud and fraud perception = greater trust = more legitimacy. On that point, reform efforts aimed at greater participation can also mean more successful GOTV. This can mean consent perception is higher, legitimacy higher, difficult policy easier to live with.

vaccinator 6y ago

It'd be nice to have a system where democrats cant enter 10x the vote count: https://factcheck.afp.com/human-error-michigan-county-vote-tally-sparks-claims-election-fraud https://factcheck.afp.com/human-error-michigan-county-vote-t...

nikolay 6y ago

No bullchain, please! There are better and simpler systems using public key cryptography!