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This may surprise you, but most voting systems make verification hard deliberately. If you can check your vote at home, others can verify your vote as well, whi

by moomin 6y ago

This may surprise you, but most voting systems make verification hard deliberately. If you can check your vote at home, others can verify your vote as well, which means you've lost the advantages of a secret ballot.

dgellow 6y ago
You can only know my vote if you have a way to associate an address with an identity. Unless that's the case, you may be able to check the set of votes, but that's it.
- Nullabillity 6y ago
  Whoever forces you to vote a certain way can force you to reveal your address too.
  - dgellow 6y ago
    Fair point
- KallDrexx 6y ago
  Maybe I'm missing something, but I think the original point is that blockchain will help the voting process by providing the transparency and verification in the process. And part of that is everyone being able to see that yes the winner won because we can see every vote and clearly see who won. However, that doesn't help unless you know that every vote was a legitimate and eligible vote. How do you know the votes are legitimate and eligible if the address is anonymous? You need some system to either publicly identify each address or you need a central authority saying which addresses are allowed to vote. The latter goes right back to the situation we are in today and the blockchain becomes no more useful than a centralized database, because we are still reliant on the centralized authority to tell us how many valid votes mattered.
  - dgellow 6y ago
    You have a list of citizens, their personal information are stored in your country databases. They have a unique key pair assigned at some point during their life (let's call it Citizen Key, may be paired to a Citizen ID or something like this). There is a new voting event, each citizen can now create a voting wallet using their Citizen Key then vote on the various motions by sending a transaction to a destination wallet created for this event. At the end of the voting event, the votes are counted and no transaction can be send to the destination wallet. You do have a central authority, it's the country (or state). Only citizens can vote, and only citizens have a valid set of keys. The benefits is that anyone voting or people who want to verify the voting numbers can do, and without having to trust the software managing the database (I mean, you of course have to trust the blockchain itself...).
- willis936 6y ago
  Address records are very much not considered private. Yellow pages only stopped being printed in 2019. The information is still accessible.
  - dgellow 6y ago
    By "address" I meant a wallet address on the blockchain.
- Majromax 6y ago
  > You can only know my vote if you have a way to associate an address with an identity. A secret ballot makes it impossible to verify votes even with collusion between the voter and interested party. That makes vote-purchasing infeasible, since I could take money to vote for you and still defect at the secret ballot box. A cryptographically-secure secret ballot in this threat model would need to provide the voter with a valid zero-knowledge proof for their actual vote and an imposter zero-knowledge proof for their alternative vote. Something like "if I input A into the system, then it counted vote X; if I input B then it counted vote Y," with A/B remaining private to the voter.

by moomin 6y ago

dgellow 6y ago

You can only know my vote if you have a way to associate an address with an identity. Unless that's the case, you may be able to check the set of votes, but that's it.

Nullabillity 6y ago
Whoever forces you to vote a certain way can force you to reveal your address too.
- dgellow 6y ago
  Fair point
KallDrexx 6y ago
Maybe I'm missing something, but I think the original point is that blockchain will help the voting process by providing the transparency and verification in the process. And part of that is everyone being able to see that yes the winner won because we can see every vote and clearly see who won. However, that doesn't help unless you know that every vote was a legitimate and eligible vote. How do you know the votes are legitimate and eligible if the address is anonymous? You need some system to either publicly identify each address or you need a central authority saying which addresses are allowed to vote. The latter goes right back to the situation we are in today and the blockchain becomes no more useful than a centralized database, because we are still reliant on the centralized authority to tell us how many valid votes mattered.
- dgellow 6y ago
  You have a list of citizens, their personal information are stored in your country databases. They have a unique key pair assigned at some point during their life (let's call it Citizen Key, may be paired to a Citizen ID or something like this). There is a new voting event, each citizen can now create a voting wallet using their Citizen Key then vote on the various motions by sending a transaction to a destination wallet created for this event. At the end of the voting event, the votes are counted and no transaction can be send to the destination wallet. You do have a central authority, it's the country (or state). Only citizens can vote, and only citizens have a valid set of keys. The benefits is that anyone voting or people who want to verify the voting numbers can do, and without having to trust the software managing the database (I mean, you of course have to trust the blockchain itself...).
willis936 6y ago
Address records are very much not considered private. Yellow pages only stopped being printed in 2019. The information is still accessible.
- dgellow 6y ago
  By "address" I meant a wallet address on the blockchain.
Majromax 6y ago
> You can only know my vote if you have a way to associate an address with an identity. A secret ballot makes it impossible to verify votes even with collusion between the voter and interested party. That makes vote-purchasing infeasible, since I could take money to vote for you and still defect at the secret ballot box. A cryptographically-secure secret ballot in this threat model would need to provide the voter with a valid zero-knowledge proof for their actual vote and an imposter zero-knowledge proof for their alternative vote. Something like "if I input A into the system, then it counted vote X; if I input B then it counted vote Y," with A/B remaining private to the voter.