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Yeah. They've been around for decades. Applied Cryptography gives them (excellent book; highly entertaining, yet reasonably mathematical). The gist of it is tha

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/

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/