6 ms·

> We have cryptographic protocols for honest, verifiable, anonymous elections, which we don't bother implementing We do?

woofie11 6y ago
Yeah. They've been around for decades. Applied Cryptography gives them (excellent book; highly entertaining, yet reasonably mathematical). The gist of it is that: - Everyone can verify who voted (so number of votes equals number of voters) - Everyone can verify their individual vote was correctly and uniquely counted - All votes are released under unique, anonymous identifiers, so anyone can recount all votes - However, no one can verify anyone else's vote individually It's pretty awesome! I've watched with gradual shock and horror as voting machines came out and seemed almost designed for riggable elections.
- Ste_Evans 6y ago
  "and seemed almost designed for riggable elections" And yet all parties have passed up this oh-so-easy opportunity to rig an election, even Trump. Do you think they are not easily riggable, in fact, and you're just making stuff up?
- Phrodo_00 6y ago
  I've seen this before. Do you remember the name of the algorithm? The question I've had with this is whether you can prove who you voted for. If you can, you can sell your vote and prove tongue buyer that you voted correctly. That's also my concern with mail in voting.
  - woofie11 6y ago
    It's complex. The scheme I saw in Applied Cryptography would in abstract permit vote selling, but not simple vote selling -- you'd need pretty complex security between the buyer and seller. If you're trying to buy my vote, and I'm trying to sell it, I could give you my unique anonymous number, and you could verify my votes. But I could also vote a different way, lie, and give you someone else's unique number, and you'd have no way to know. You could ask for a special ballot too, where, for example, I vote a particular pattern (yes/no/no/yes/yes/no), to encode things, ideally picking ones that aren't likely to come up in practice, or other complex schemes, but these generally have work-arounds. At the end of the day, though, it'd be cheaper and easier for you to require me to wear a pinhole camera to vote, do a mail-in, or otherwise. Plus, we had open voting for much of history, and it worked okay. If we went back to the risk of illegal vote selling versus the risk of wholesale election fraud, I'd take the former which seems like the lesser of two evils (and much easier to police too).
- rbanffy 6y ago
  > Everyone can verify their individual vote was correctly and uniquely counted This violates the secrecy of the vote. I can threaten you to vote for someone then force you to prove you voted according to my orders.
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    Right on. Voting systems must have integrity but also voter anonymity. To quote Schneier: > If we could do away with anonymity — if everyone could check that their vote was counted correctly — then it would be easy to secure the vote. But that would lead to other problems. Before the US had the secret ballot, voter coercion and vote-buying were widespread. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_electi_1.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_elec...
  - phtrivier 6y ago
    Suprisingly enough, the strongest fear is not so much "pressuring people to vote for X" but "having a black market of people getting paid to vote for Y".
  - woofie11 6y ago
    ... and I can lie and show you the vote of someone who voted the same as your orders, unless you following me to the polls (in which case, you might as well hide a pinhole camera in my button).
  - posterboy 6y ago
    easy fix, give out a spoofed second of course every fix creates another problem
    - AshamedCaptain 6y ago
      Yes. And I've not found a single "digital" voting method so far that fixes this entire chain of problems.
- kumarsw 6y ago
  How would this work in practice? Voters post to a publicly accessible append-only database from a personally owned computer? Can this be implemented on paper ballots?
  - woofie11 6y ago
    I'm not sure it's relevant. Paper ballots can't be hacked on a national scale. I trust my local election commission. And even modest fraud can be managed; if someone wins with 45% of the vote, we've changed an outcome, but the democratic check-and-balance remains. The problem is closed, proprietary, secretive, touchscreen voting machines. For all we know, Biden won Texas. Or perhaps everyone wrote in Putin as a joke write-in. We just don't know. For how this works in practice, Applied Cryptography has a nice, readable explanation.
- sam_goody 6y ago
  https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/
Natanael_L 6y ago
Yes and no. Techniques like Zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption and multiparty computation exists, but none of them are sufficient for elections. The security requirements are simply too complex, and we can't require that every voter manages a private keypair to issue their votes from an electronic device they can't audit. Paper voting is safer.
- woofie11 6y ago
  The systems I know don't require voters to keep a private key pair.
  - Natanael_L 6y ago
    Then how else do you validate the identity of the voter? What do you gain if you can't prevent fraud by inserting fake votes?
    - woofie11 6y ago
      * You have a list of people who voted. That's public. * You have a list of votes. That's public (and not correlated with the above) by anonymous tokens. * You have an anonymous token, which lets you verify your own vote. If the list of people who voted doesn't match up to real people, that's detectable. If I go into Massachusetts and find 10% of the people claimed to have voted don't exist, I can confirm fraud. If someone who didn't voted has there vote counted, that also confirms fraud. Anyone can count up and add up the votes. That's public too. And anyone can confirm their own vote was counted.
      - Natanael_L 6y ago
        How are those tokens less complicated to use than a private keypair? How do you ensure that the votes are cast anonymously, without leaking metadata from timing, etc?

woofie11 6y ago

Yeah. They've been around for decades. Applied Cryptography gives them (excellent book; highly entertaining, yet reasonably mathematical). The gist of it is that: - Everyone can verify who voted (so number of votes equals number of voters) - Everyone can verify their individual vote was correctly and uniquely counted - All votes are released under unique, anonymous identifiers, so anyone can recount all votes - However, no one can verify anyone else's vote individually It's pretty awesome! I've watched with gradual shock and horror as voting machines came out and seemed almost designed for riggable elections.

Ste_Evans 6y ago
"and seemed almost designed for riggable elections" And yet all parties have passed up this oh-so-easy opportunity to rig an election, even Trump. Do you think they are not easily riggable, in fact, and you're just making stuff up?
Phrodo_00 6y ago
I've seen this before. Do you remember the name of the algorithm? The question I've had with this is whether you can prove who you voted for. If you can, you can sell your vote and prove tongue buyer that you voted correctly. That's also my concern with mail in voting.
- woofie11 6y ago
  It's complex. The scheme I saw in Applied Cryptography would in abstract permit vote selling, but not simple vote selling -- you'd need pretty complex security between the buyer and seller. If you're trying to buy my vote, and I'm trying to sell it, I could give you my unique anonymous number, and you could verify my votes. But I could also vote a different way, lie, and give you someone else's unique number, and you'd have no way to know. You could ask for a special ballot too, where, for example, I vote a particular pattern (yes/no/no/yes/yes/no), to encode things, ideally picking ones that aren't likely to come up in practice, or other complex schemes, but these generally have work-arounds. At the end of the day, though, it'd be cheaper and easier for you to require me to wear a pinhole camera to vote, do a mail-in, or otherwise. Plus, we had open voting for much of history, and it worked okay. If we went back to the risk of illegal vote selling versus the risk of wholesale election fraud, I'd take the former which seems like the lesser of two evils (and much easier to police too).
rbanffy 6y ago
> Everyone can verify their individual vote was correctly and uniquely counted This violates the secrecy of the vote. I can threaten you to vote for someone then force you to prove you voted according to my orders.
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  Right on. Voting systems must have integrity but also voter anonymity. To quote Schneier: > If we could do away with anonymity — if everyone could check that their vote was counted correctly — then it would be easy to secure the vote. But that would lead to other problems. Before the US had the secret ballot, voter coercion and vote-buying were widespread. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_electi_1.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_elec...
- phtrivier 6y ago
  Suprisingly enough, the strongest fear is not so much "pressuring people to vote for X" but "having a black market of people getting paid to vote for Y".
- woofie11 6y ago
  ... and I can lie and show you the vote of someone who voted the same as your orders, unless you following me to the polls (in which case, you might as well hide a pinhole camera in my button).
- posterboy 6y ago
  easy fix, give out a spoofed second of course every fix creates another problem
  - AshamedCaptain 6y ago
    Yes. And I've not found a single "digital" voting method so far that fixes this entire chain of problems.
kumarsw 6y ago
How would this work in practice? Voters post to a publicly accessible append-only database from a personally owned computer? Can this be implemented on paper ballots?
- woofie11 6y ago
  I'm not sure it's relevant. Paper ballots can't be hacked on a national scale. I trust my local election commission. And even modest fraud can be managed; if someone wins with 45% of the vote, we've changed an outcome, but the democratic check-and-balance remains. The problem is closed, proprietary, secretive, touchscreen voting machines. For all we know, Biden won Texas. Or perhaps everyone wrote in Putin as a joke write-in. We just don't know. For how this works in practice, Applied Cryptography has a nice, readable explanation.
sam_goody 6y ago
https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/

Natanael_L 6y ago

Yes and no. Techniques like Zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption and multiparty computation exists, but none of them are sufficient for elections. The security requirements are simply too complex, and we can't require that every voter manages a private keypair to issue their votes from an electronic device they can't audit. Paper voting is safer.

woofie11 6y ago
The systems I know don't require voters to keep a private key pair.
- Natanael_L 6y ago
  Then how else do you validate the identity of the voter? What do you gain if you can't prevent fraud by inserting fake votes?
  - woofie11 6y ago
    * You have a list of people who voted. That's public. * You have a list of votes. That's public (and not correlated with the above) by anonymous tokens. * You have an anonymous token, which lets you verify your own vote. If the list of people who voted doesn't match up to real people, that's detectable. If I go into Massachusetts and find 10% of the people claimed to have voted don't exist, I can confirm fraud. If someone who didn't voted has there vote counted, that also confirms fraud. Anyone can count up and add up the votes. That's public too. And anyone can confirm their own vote was counted.
    - Natanael_L 6y ago
      How are those tokens less complicated to use than a private keypair? How do you ensure that the votes are cast anonymously, without leaking metadata from timing, etc?