6 ms·

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

by 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.
- matthewmacleod 6y ago
  One of the most common failings I see with technical people is the belief that technology should be applied to solve problems, even when those problems are pretty minimal and the application of technology could make them worse. In the US, electoral fraud is not an important issue. Fraud exists to some extent, as in every country, but the scale of it is so small that it’s not a thing worth solving. The application of an opaque and difficult to understand technology to the problem offers no appreciable benefits and comes with its own baggage. The same applies in the UK, which has piloted systems requiring voter ID. There is no appreciable benefit, and some obvious costs.
  - easytiger 6y ago
    > The same applies in the UK, which has piloted systems requiring voter ID VoterID makes perfect sense and is used in some parts of the UK already for 20 years. How anyone can possibly object to it, especially given how many and varied options are acceptable, astounds me.
    - matthewmacleod 6y ago
      It makes no sense, because it solves no problems and serves only to disenfranchise people. I can see no argument in support of it whatsoever.
      - easytiger 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Darmody 6y ago
This so much. We know paper ballots work perfectly. It's very difficult to commit fraud and as you say, can be audited easily. Adding layers upon layers of complexity on top of that is not the way.
- ajhurliman 6y ago
  Tracking votes with a blockchain doesn't necessarily mean eliminating paper ballots.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    If so, the blockchain is completely redundant, and as such presents cost, complexity and unnecessary overhead.
  - Darmody 6y ago
    Then what is it for? I wouldn't like an immutable registry of everybody's vote stored forever.
- chrismcb 6y ago
  Gore might disagree with your assertion that paper ballots work perfectly. And the question about sharpies, this year, throws a question in there. Personally I would love to see digital voting. But paper ballots do leave a paper trail that is much more difficult to change. But they aren't perfect.
ulucs 6y ago
> remember the Russian hacking of voter systems in 2016? The funniest thing is, those are the same people claiming the election is ironclad now, now that it's them who have won. I think Turkey can be a great example in this regard. No one trusts the opposing parties with cheating, so every single vote is watched by six parties simultaneously during the count: 1. There are paper ballots thrown in the cases 2. After the election ends, the votes are counted openly. It is a constitutional right to be there and watch while votes are counted. 3. After the count ends, the tally is written down and posted for anyone to see. People take pictures of the tally in order to upload into a central database - be it a party's or an unaffiliated third party's 4. The cases are then shipped to the election committee, which aggregate the results. They also post the results of each case, so that anyone can check against the database and contest of there are mistakes. The whole process is open to be checked by everyone and since trust is so low these days, everyone keeps track very closely. Even in Turkey's conditions, this gives some kind of peace of mind.
- matthewmacleod 6y ago
  The funniest thing is, those are the same people claiming the election is ironclad now, now that it's them who have won. No they aren’t.
  - tha0xe 6y ago
    Yes they are.
- lukev 6y ago
  You're describing exactly what happens in (most) of the US. The "fraud" alleged by Trump in this case consists mostly of his observers being asked to stand 6 feet back so the election officials could actually work. And the officials themselves are selected from each party.
  - easytiger 6y ago
    My assumption was that it was so they couldn't read identities on postal ballots. Another claim of fraud was that they were not allowed to photograph the ballots.
godelski 6y ago
I'm not sure I buy this argument. What needs to be transparent to people is how votes are counted, not the logistics of how they are communicated and stored. People are doing pretty well where other countries have much more complicated systems (look at Australia having used IRV for over a hundred years. IRV has many rounds of voting and is substantially more complex). If your goal is full transparency of every component, I don't think a lot of people here could understand that. There's a lot happening and to understand everything at a low level takes a lot of expertise. Understanding at a high level "experts use fancy math to make my vote private and immutable" is easy but also requires a lot of trust. Something we have to do regardless of full transparency, because someone could in fact hire a bunch of people to rig things. The problem is the breakdown of trust. Fox has been talking about voter fraud for well over a decade and while they do have clear examples, they are over inflated at their significance (sorry, one person counting twice does not constitute a rigged election with a million voters. It constitutes a mistake). The president has a devout fanbase and echos this rhetoric from a very privileged platform. The problem is trust. There's the old saying "trust but verify." The transparency is the ability to verify, but does not require that every person is able to. So don't needlessly tie your hands behind your back.
- TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
  > Understanding at a high level "experts use fancy math to make my vote private and immutable" is easy but also requires a lot of trust. A lot more trust than the current system, where voters and observers can at least believe what their eyes see. With a digital system nothing they see happening necessarily means anything! They can't verify it, and thus they shouldn't trust it.
  - godelski 6y ago
    I'm not sure this is meaningfully different than what currently happens. Can you expand on this more? Currently we don't have paper trails. We don't have good ways to verify that our vote was counted and that it has the correct value to it. An immutable data structure helps solve this, especially if it is auditable. I'm all for paper trails, and I think they are necessary, but our current system isn't exactly transparent either. Logistically this is impractical. We've always relied on a subset of people to tell us it is trustworthy. I.e. the volunteers that count. If you can have that and do cryptographic arithmetic so that anyone with a computer can verify the results, that's more transparent, not less. I mean I think there's this idea that people counting physical ballots in a rushed and hectic environment has high accuracy. That sounds like a naive assumption to me. But what is that error? 0.5%? 1%? For the most party elections are not won by that margin and when they are a recount is issued (and low and behold, numbers change slightly. Proving that the counting is imperfect but good enough).
ianai 6y ago
Isn’t this more an implementation problem than anything? People live their lives by encryption every day - and even have surgeries from remote doctors. I’m sure a secure way to reliably vote via electronic means could be implemented, if funding it were a societal concern. Granted, I’m thinking it’s probably just cheaper to rely on the minimum wage and volunteer work as we do now.

by lukev 6y ago

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.
matthewmacleod 6y ago
One of the most common failings I see with technical people is the belief that technology should be applied to solve problems, even when those problems are pretty minimal and the application of technology could make them worse. In the US, electoral fraud is not an important issue. Fraud exists to some extent, as in every country, but the scale of it is so small that it’s not a thing worth solving. The application of an opaque and difficult to understand technology to the problem offers no appreciable benefits and comes with its own baggage. The same applies in the UK, which has piloted systems requiring voter ID. There is no appreciable benefit, and some obvious costs.
- easytiger 6y ago
  > The same applies in the UK, which has piloted systems requiring voter ID VoterID makes perfect sense and is used in some parts of the UK already for 20 years. How anyone can possibly object to it, especially given how many and varied options are acceptable, astounds me.
  - matthewmacleod 6y ago
    It makes no sense, because it solves no problems and serves only to disenfranchise people. I can see no argument in support of it whatsoever.
    - easytiger 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Darmody 6y ago

This so much. We know paper ballots work perfectly. It's very difficult to commit fraud and as you say, can be audited easily. Adding layers upon layers of complexity on top of that is not the way.

ajhurliman 6y ago
Tracking votes with a blockchain doesn't necessarily mean eliminating paper ballots.
- ddingus 6y ago
  If so, the blockchain is completely redundant, and as such presents cost, complexity and unnecessary overhead.
- Darmody 6y ago
  Then what is it for? I wouldn't like an immutable registry of everybody's vote stored forever.
chrismcb 6y ago
Gore might disagree with your assertion that paper ballots work perfectly. And the question about sharpies, this year, throws a question in there. Personally I would love to see digital voting. But paper ballots do leave a paper trail that is much more difficult to change. But they aren't perfect.

ulucs 6y ago

> remember the Russian hacking of voter systems in 2016? The funniest thing is, those are the same people claiming the election is ironclad now, now that it's them who have won. I think Turkey can be a great example in this regard. No one trusts the opposing parties with cheating, so every single vote is watched by six parties simultaneously during the count: 1. There are paper ballots thrown in the cases 2. After the election ends, the votes are counted openly. It is a constitutional right to be there and watch while votes are counted. 3. After the count ends, the tally is written down and posted for anyone to see. People take pictures of the tally in order to upload into a central database - be it a party's or an unaffiliated third party's 4. The cases are then shipped to the election committee, which aggregate the results. They also post the results of each case, so that anyone can check against the database and contest of there are mistakes. The whole process is open to be checked by everyone and since trust is so low these days, everyone keeps track very closely. Even in Turkey's conditions, this gives some kind of peace of mind.

matthewmacleod 6y ago
The funniest thing is, those are the same people claiming the election is ironclad now, now that it's them who have won. No they aren’t.
- tha0xe 6y ago
  Yes they are.
lukev 6y ago
You're describing exactly what happens in (most) of the US. The "fraud" alleged by Trump in this case consists mostly of his observers being asked to stand 6 feet back so the election officials could actually work. And the officials themselves are selected from each party.
- easytiger 6y ago
  My assumption was that it was so they couldn't read identities on postal ballots. Another claim of fraud was that they were not allowed to photograph the ballots.

godelski 6y ago

I'm not sure I buy this argument. What needs to be transparent to people is how votes are counted, not the logistics of how they are communicated and stored. People are doing pretty well where other countries have much more complicated systems (look at Australia having used IRV for over a hundred years. IRV has many rounds of voting and is substantially more complex). If your goal is full transparency of every component, I don't think a lot of people here could understand that. There's a lot happening and to understand everything at a low level takes a lot of expertise. Understanding at a high level "experts use fancy math to make my vote private and immutable" is easy but also requires a lot of trust. Something we have to do regardless of full transparency, because someone could in fact hire a bunch of people to rig things. The problem is the breakdown of trust. Fox has been talking about voter fraud for well over a decade and while they do have clear examples, they are over inflated at their significance (sorry, one person counting twice does not constitute a rigged election with a million voters. It constitutes a mistake). The president has a devout fanbase and echos this rhetoric from a very privileged platform. The problem is trust. There's the old saying "trust but verify." The transparency is the ability to verify, but does not require that every person is able to. So don't needlessly tie your hands behind your back.

TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
> Understanding at a high level "experts use fancy math to make my vote private and immutable" is easy but also requires a lot of trust. A lot more trust than the current system, where voters and observers can at least believe what their eyes see. With a digital system nothing they see happening necessarily means anything! They can't verify it, and thus they shouldn't trust it.
- godelski 6y ago
  I'm not sure this is meaningfully different than what currently happens. Can you expand on this more? Currently we don't have paper trails. We don't have good ways to verify that our vote was counted and that it has the correct value to it. An immutable data structure helps solve this, especially if it is auditable. I'm all for paper trails, and I think they are necessary, but our current system isn't exactly transparent either. Logistically this is impractical. We've always relied on a subset of people to tell us it is trustworthy. I.e. the volunteers that count. If you can have that and do cryptographic arithmetic so that anyone with a computer can verify the results, that's more transparent, not less. I mean I think there's this idea that people counting physical ballots in a rushed and hectic environment has high accuracy. That sounds like a naive assumption to me. But what is that error? 0.5%? 1%? For the most party elections are not won by that margin and when they are a recount is issued (and low and behold, numbers change slightly. Proving that the counting is imperfect but good enough).

ianai 6y ago

Isn’t this more an implementation problem than anything? People live their lives by encryption every day - and even have surgeries from remote doctors. I’m sure a secure way to reliably vote via electronic means could be implemented, if funding it were a societal concern. Granted, I’m thinking it’s probably just cheaper to rely on the minimum wage and volunteer work as we do now.