6 ms·

I'm never trusting software for two things: 1. Voting 2. Irreversible transactions

dheera 6y ago
I suppose I'll be downvoted for this but my unpopular opinion is that I feel like the voting problem is solvable with some combination of decentralized and cryptographic tech. It's just that the people who can solve it don't want to solve it.
- war1025 6y ago
  The thing about voting is that for the public to trust voting, it needs to be something a general member of the public can understand. That is why paper balloting is such a durable voting mechanism. Pretty well anyone can understand how you would take a stack of paper ballots and decide who got the most votes. From there you just need to maintain a chain of custody where all ballots are monitored by any interested parties from the time they are cast to the time they are counted. The more technical you get with your voting solutions, the less overall trust the public will have in the final vote counts.
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    I understand the argument here, but to play devil's advocate... In the 2020 presidential election, tens of millions of people had trouble understanding how paper ballots worked. I'm not sure the argument about public trust is that durable or cogent at this point.
    - tylerhou 6y ago
      Most people who claim that there was fraud in the election focus on the voting machines — that they were programmed to "flip" votes, there were servers in Germany, or they had some linearly "weighted" mode which was allegedly turned on. They claim that "the algorithm" caused the election to be stolen from Trump. If we created a cryptographic voting system with homomorphic encryption to preserve privacy, they would be claiming the exact same thing — except in that case, you wouldn't be able to recount the ballots by hand.
    - war1025 6y ago
      Most of the arguments I saw were about the chain of custody being broken and allegations that ballots were tampered with at that point. That is different from not understanding how a paper ballot works.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    I think paper + blockchain. Paper ballot with anti-counterfeit tech (maybe fingerprint requirement as well for uniqueness check), scanned with an image recorded on blockchain (or hash of image stored on chain), then I think ballot images should be publicly viewable (with personal info redacted) so anyone can audit.
- birdperson77 6y ago
  I'm not sure it is solvable. Voting has to satisfy two requirements: 1) Votes must be private and anonymous (i.e. not linked to your identity) 2) Voting must be secure It's easy to satisfy either one of these requirements, but currently impossible to satisfy both.
  - tomcam 6y ago
    Pieces of paper in big boxes work pretty well, especially when they are enclosed in a sealed envelope with return address information for verification in case of fraud accusations.
    - h_anna_h 6y ago
      Having the return address information on voting envelopes is a simple way to destroy deniability. Now you can prove who voted X if you have access to the envelopes.
  - trickstra 6y ago
    I would argue that the paper voting doesn't satisfy both conditions either. And while putting a paper in a box is vividly understandable to the average voter, whatever happens to the vote after that point isn't, as evident by the number of people believing that a Texas lawsuit may overturn Michigan election results.
    - chrisco255 6y ago
      That's because there's video evidence of Fulton County Georgia poll workers clearing out all poll watchers on the basis of a bullshit pipe leak story and then as soon as everyone left they brought out suitcases of ballots and started scanning them in. There's 1000 affidavits of egregious election fraud and abuse in this election. The Supreme Court's refusal to even hear Texas's case is outrageous.
  - tdons 6y ago
    Define 'secure'?
- bawolff 6y ago
  Its an active research area, there are proposals like helios https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting which check some of the boxes but aren't perfect . I'm sure cryptographers would love to come up with a fully scalable, trustless, verifiable, anonomous, coercion resistant system. But that's a hard set of properties to satisfy especially if nothing is in the physical world. If you allow physical voting places, then just make a machine that gives a paper recipt and do risk limiting audits. Problem solved.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    No, scan the full paper ballots with personal info redacted and make them publicly accessible so anyone can count the result.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      So you don't trust the machines to scan the ballots to count them, but you do trust them enough to scan the ballots so that the public can count them? If the machine is compromised the scanning step will be compromised. Personally i think risk limiting audits of the original physical documents is a much more secure system.
- h_anna_h 6y ago
  Many people have tried to solve it in the past and all of the attempts ended in failure. It appears that it is non-trivial to have both secret voting and at the same time make it possible for the voters to prove that the election was not rigged.
- yongjik 6y ago
  I mean, it's been already solved with a decentralized, low-cost, secure technology. It's called paper, and it has this wonderful security property that the amount of work needed to subvert the result is proportional to the number of votes you need to change, whatever you do.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
olliej 6y ago
(2) the transactions are irreversible, and the software is clearly doing that well. The problem is people don't actually want irreversible transactions, they've just been told that they do.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Yes, they do. That is a feature, not a bug. It gives digital transactions the same properties as cash. When you hand over $50K in cash to someone, you better make sure you trust that someone. When you send $50K in crypto to an address, you better make sure you trust that address. People have to learn new habits and precautions with crypto. With great power comes great responsibility. Maybe the UI for wallets should do more to defend against erroneous sends, or warn the user to make a test transaction before sending large amounts? A lot more can be done with UX.
  - jtchang 6y ago
    When you hand someone cash you can get the cash back. You know the person you can chase them down.
    - chrisco255 6y ago
      No, you can't necessarily get it back. It's like sending cash internationally, but you sent it to the wrong address and now you don't know who the fuck has it.
      - olliej 6y ago
        If you mis-address cash sent internationally it does get held for reversal. That's why international wires require so many details.
        MacsHeadroom 6y ago
        A wire is not "cash." Cash, in this conversation, refers to paper and metal transfered physically.
oh_sigh 6y ago
Don't be naive - the transaction is definitely reversible. It's just that enough Important people need to agree it is reversible. If it was an Important person who lost money, or the loss was big enough to be bad PR, they would hard fork the chain and pretend like the transaction never happened.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  No it's irreversible. Ethereum had one hard fork in its history (the DAO hack of 2016) and it was contentious and caused a split in the community. It can't be done Willy nilly. Wallets should do more to prevent these types of sends from occuring, providing warnings. But you should also never ever send $50K without a test transaction of some token amount first.

I suppose I'll be downvoted for this but my unpopular opinion is that I feel like the voting problem is solvable with some combination of decentralized and cryptographic tech. It's just that the people who can solve it don't want to solve it.

war1025 6y ago
The thing about voting is that for the public to trust voting, it needs to be something a general member of the public can understand. That is why paper balloting is such a durable voting mechanism. Pretty well anyone can understand how you would take a stack of paper ballots and decide who got the most votes. From there you just need to maintain a chain of custody where all ballots are monitored by any interested parties from the time they are cast to the time they are counted. The more technical you get with your voting solutions, the less overall trust the public will have in the final vote counts.
- sebmellen 6y ago
  I understand the argument here, but to play devil's advocate... In the 2020 presidential election, tens of millions of people had trouble understanding how paper ballots worked. I'm not sure the argument about public trust is that durable or cogent at this point.
  - tylerhou 6y ago
    Most people who claim that there was fraud in the election focus on the voting machines — that they were programmed to "flip" votes, there were servers in Germany, or they had some linearly "weighted" mode which was allegedly turned on. They claim that "the algorithm" caused the election to be stolen from Trump. If we created a cryptographic voting system with homomorphic encryption to preserve privacy, they would be claiming the exact same thing — except in that case, you wouldn't be able to recount the ballots by hand.
  - war1025 6y ago
    Most of the arguments I saw were about the chain of custody being broken and allegations that ballots were tampered with at that point. That is different from not understanding how a paper ballot works.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  I think paper + blockchain. Paper ballot with anti-counterfeit tech (maybe fingerprint requirement as well for uniqueness check), scanned with an image recorded on blockchain (or hash of image stored on chain), then I think ballot images should be publicly viewable (with personal info redacted) so anyone can audit.
birdperson77 6y ago
I'm not sure it is solvable. Voting has to satisfy two requirements: 1) Votes must be private and anonymous (i.e. not linked to your identity) 2) Voting must be secure It's easy to satisfy either one of these requirements, but currently impossible to satisfy both.
- tomcam 6y ago
  Pieces of paper in big boxes work pretty well, especially when they are enclosed in a sealed envelope with return address information for verification in case of fraud accusations.
  - h_anna_h 6y ago
    Having the return address information on voting envelopes is a simple way to destroy deniability. Now you can prove who voted X if you have access to the envelopes.
- trickstra 6y ago
  I would argue that the paper voting doesn't satisfy both conditions either. And while putting a paper in a box is vividly understandable to the average voter, whatever happens to the vote after that point isn't, as evident by the number of people believing that a Texas lawsuit may overturn Michigan election results.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    That's because there's video evidence of Fulton County Georgia poll workers clearing out all poll watchers on the basis of a bullshit pipe leak story and then as soon as everyone left they brought out suitcases of ballots and started scanning them in. There's 1000 affidavits of egregious election fraud and abuse in this election. The Supreme Court's refusal to even hear Texas's case is outrageous.
- tdons 6y ago
  Define 'secure'?
bawolff 6y ago
Its an active research area, there are proposals like helios https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Voting which check some of the boxes but aren't perfect . I'm sure cryptographers would love to come up with a fully scalable, trustless, verifiable, anonomous, coercion resistant system. But that's a hard set of properties to satisfy especially if nothing is in the physical world. If you allow physical voting places, then just make a machine that gives a paper recipt and do risk limiting audits. Problem solved.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  No, scan the full paper ballots with personal info redacted and make them publicly accessible so anyone can count the result.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    So you don't trust the machines to scan the ballots to count them, but you do trust them enough to scan the ballots so that the public can count them? If the machine is compromised the scanning step will be compromised. Personally i think risk limiting audits of the original physical documents is a much more secure system.
h_anna_h 6y ago
Many people have tried to solve it in the past and all of the attempts ended in failure. It appears that it is non-trivial to have both secret voting and at the same time make it possible for the voters to prove that the election was not rigged.
yongjik 6y ago
I mean, it's been already solved with a decentralized, low-cost, secure technology. It's called paper, and it has this wonderful security property that the amount of work needed to subvert the result is proportional to the number of votes you need to change, whatever you do.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

olliej 6y ago

(2) the transactions are irreversible, and the software is clearly doing that well. The problem is people don't actually want irreversible transactions, they've just been told that they do.

chrisco255 6y ago
Yes, they do. That is a feature, not a bug. It gives digital transactions the same properties as cash. When you hand over $50K in cash to someone, you better make sure you trust that someone. When you send $50K in crypto to an address, you better make sure you trust that address. People have to learn new habits and precautions with crypto. With great power comes great responsibility. Maybe the UI for wallets should do more to defend against erroneous sends, or warn the user to make a test transaction before sending large amounts? A lot more can be done with UX.
- jtchang 6y ago
  When you hand someone cash you can get the cash back. You know the person you can chase them down.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    No, you can't necessarily get it back. It's like sending cash internationally, but you sent it to the wrong address and now you don't know who the fuck has it.
    - olliej 6y ago
      If you mis-address cash sent internationally it does get held for reversal. That's why international wires require so many details.
      - MacsHeadroom 6y ago
        A wire is not "cash." Cash, in this conversation, refers to paper and metal transfered physically.

oh_sigh 6y ago

Don't be naive - the transaction is definitely reversible. It's just that enough Important people need to agree it is reversible. If it was an Important person who lost money, or the loss was big enough to be bad PR, they would hard fork the chain and pretend like the transaction never happened.

chrisco255 6y ago
No it's irreversible. Ethereum had one hard fork in its history (the DAO hack of 2016) and it was contentious and caused a split in the community. It can't be done Willy nilly. Wallets should do more to prevent these types of sends from occuring, providing warnings. But you should also never ever send $50K without a test transaction of some token amount first.