4 ms·

I'd trust the blockchain enough to use it for voting if implemented in an open-source way. Something like Monero allowing for only the individuals involved in t

I'd trust the blockchain enough to use it for voting if implemented in an open-source way. Something like Monero allowing for only the individuals involved in the transaction to know who they voted for.

plopilop 6y ago
I would not use a blockchain (nor anything else) for e-voting to be honest. While I could get somewhat confident with some of the e-voting protocols (and that's not a given), it means that citizens should trust a protocol (and an implementation, and a machine) that only people having a doctorate in the field can assess. On the other hand, paper voting is simple, secure enough, and easy to understand by everyone. In my opinion, e-voting is a solution to a problem that never existed.
- encryptluks2 6y ago
  Reminder that using paper ballots mean that you never can make sure your vote was counted accurately and you have thousands of people on extreme sides of both political spectrums capable of interfering with your vote in some way.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - remram 6y ago
    You can watch people open the envelopes and count the votes.
    - snug 6y ago
      Can you guarantee the supply chain, and the people watching every vote?
      - bawolff 6y ago
        Yes? Just livestream the whole process.
        snug 6y ago
        Mail in voting? Early voting last for up to 2 months. That doesn't scale to 100M votes
        remram 6y ago
        By "using paper ballots" I understood it to be in-person, voting by mail has a lot of issues indeed.
        snug 6y ago
        Usually in person voting is done through a machine. Where as vote by mail is a paper ballet
        bawolff 6y ago
        Only in the united states (where i am not from). Normally i think of paper ballots as the hand counted sort. However as long as tge machine is just a scanner (still paper trail) much of the same argument spplies.
        remram 6y ago
        That sounds ridiculous but I'm sure it works this way in the US. If you can have the worst of both worlds why not make it so.
        remram 6y ago
        Or just stand there. Where I'm from, representatives from each party and members of the public will be present the whole day.
      - ben-schaaf 6y ago
        Yes? In Australia every candidate can appoint scrutineers to watch votes being counted.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    We have well understood systems to mitigate risk of election tampeting with paper ballots. Not perfect, but enough i trust it.
    - dumbfoundded 6y ago
      I think any reasonable system would include both. Paper backups + digital efficiency seems like the way to do it. Maybe paper backups + blockchain digital solutions would be preferable.
      - bawolff 6y ago
        At which point why bother with the blockchain?
        dumbfoundded 6y ago
        I think the point of blockchain is that it's more traceable and secure than other open options. I would think of it less as a crypto-currency and more of a merkle tree like git. Voting blockchain solutions won't be decentralized. It's just a useful protocol with some benefits.
        bawolff 6y ago
        Which is not what you want in a secret ballot election. Ballot secrecy is an important safeguard to prevent coercion and vote buying.
        dumbfoundded 6y ago
        There are protocol choices that still enable secret voting like monero for example.
- hwbehrens 6y ago
  > citizens should trust a protocol (and an implementation, and a machine) that only people having a doctorate in the field can assess People commonly do rely upon encryption schemes in precisely this way to protect their finances, healthcare, privacy, and so on (and in spite of constant implementation failures!). I would revise the premise to something like, "it will several decades for users to build trust such a system". > In my opinion, e-voting is a solution to a problem that never existed. I believe using it to re-implement existing voting schemes is misguided; it would be like using the internet to replace in-person banking with video calls to a bank teller. New paradigms are more exciting to me than recreations of existing paradigms, even if some features are sacrificed (e.g. cash deposits, in the banking example). The geographically-hierarchical systems we rely on currently evolved based on their useful properties of being communication- and computation-efficient. That is, holding elections which satisfy the Smith criterion [0] or offer Byzantine tolerance [1] would be difficult to achieve if all you have is paper, pencil, and Pony Express. It also supports why elections are held relatively infrequently -- sending politicians overland to gather together to perform some kind of in-person consensus mechanism (e.g. quorum establishment) isn't something you want to do all the time. We have back-justified this system with the rationalization that local leaders best reflect the concerns of their community, but this is an enormous simplification -- essentially, it takes the preference space of the electorate (all the issues they care about), embeds it down to one dimension (the list of candidates), and then re-projects it back to the higher space (the candidate's stances). Preserving the feature space by holding more frequent elections [2], or allowing users to choose which features they care about through issue-based vote delegation [3], would be more interesting to me. To go back to the previous point, as complexity increases, trust becomes more difficult to grow, and existing mechanisms also have thousands of years as a head-start. It will take time, but I hope that people will be open-minded enough to try it at some point in the future. Maybe it will be as low-stakes as how to stock the office fridge, or which equipment to purchase for the local park. But these are the kinds of baby steps that will eventually enable better governance systems. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_criterion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_criterion [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-direct_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-direct_democracy [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy
dmitriid 6y ago
> allowing for only the individuals involved in the transaction to know who they voted for. So you want a backdoor, but "only for individuals who voted to know only their vote"? That... that doesn't work.
- dboreham 6y ago
  Do you mean doesn't work in an algorithmic sense, or in the sense that the voter can be bludgeoned into allowing someone else to use that capability?
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    Once you have a backdoor, everyone has the backdoor.
- meowkit 6y ago
  Zero knowledge proofs are the solution for verifying a vote was counted correctly without revealing what the vote actually was.
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    This still doesn't help, does it? If I can verify that I voted, and my vote counted for something, doesn't mean that the entire vote was counted correctly, or that everyone voted as they are saying they voted, or that a "corrupt government"[1] didn't flood the vote with their own fake votes. [1] "Corrupt government officials" is the inevitable straw man in any blockchain discussions.

plopilop 6y ago

I would not use a blockchain (nor anything else) for e-voting to be honest. While I could get somewhat confident with some of the e-voting protocols (and that's not a given), it means that citizens should trust a protocol (and an implementation, and a machine) that only people having a doctorate in the field can assess. On the other hand, paper voting is simple, secure enough, and easy to understand by everyone. In my opinion, e-voting is a solution to a problem that never existed.

encryptluks2 6y ago
Reminder that using paper ballots mean that you never can make sure your vote was counted accurately and you have thousands of people on extreme sides of both political spectrums capable of interfering with your vote in some way.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- remram 6y ago
  You can watch people open the envelopes and count the votes.
  - snug 6y ago
    Can you guarantee the supply chain, and the people watching every vote?
    - bawolff 6y ago
      Yes? Just livestream the whole process.
      - snug 6y ago
        Mail in voting? Early voting last for up to 2 months. That doesn't scale to 100M votes
        remram 6y ago
        By "using paper ballots" I understood it to be in-person, voting by mail has a lot of issues indeed.
        snug 6y ago
        Usually in person voting is done through a machine. Where as vote by mail is a paper ballet
        bawolff 6y ago
        Only in the united states (where i am not from). Normally i think of paper ballots as the hand counted sort. However as long as tge machine is just a scanner (still paper trail) much of the same argument spplies.
        remram 6y ago
        That sounds ridiculous but I'm sure it works this way in the US. If you can have the worst of both worlds why not make it so.
      - remram 6y ago
        Or just stand there. Where I'm from, representatives from each party and members of the public will be present the whole day.
    - ben-schaaf 6y ago
      Yes? In Australia every candidate can appoint scrutineers to watch votes being counted.
- bawolff 6y ago
  We have well understood systems to mitigate risk of election tampeting with paper ballots. Not perfect, but enough i trust it.
  - dumbfoundded 6y ago
    I think any reasonable system would include both. Paper backups + digital efficiency seems like the way to do it. Maybe paper backups + blockchain digital solutions would be preferable.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      At which point why bother with the blockchain?
      - dumbfoundded 6y ago
        I think the point of blockchain is that it's more traceable and secure than other open options. I would think of it less as a crypto-currency and more of a merkle tree like git. Voting blockchain solutions won't be decentralized. It's just a useful protocol with some benefits.
        bawolff 6y ago
        Which is not what you want in a secret ballot election. Ballot secrecy is an important safeguard to prevent coercion and vote buying.
        dumbfoundded 6y ago
        There are protocol choices that still enable secret voting like monero for example.
hwbehrens 6y ago
> citizens should trust a protocol (and an implementation, and a machine) that only people having a doctorate in the field can assess People commonly do rely upon encryption schemes in precisely this way to protect their finances, healthcare, privacy, and so on (and in spite of constant implementation failures!). I would revise the premise to something like, "it will several decades for users to build trust such a system". > In my opinion, e-voting is a solution to a problem that never existed. I believe using it to re-implement existing voting schemes is misguided; it would be like using the internet to replace in-person banking with video calls to a bank teller. New paradigms are more exciting to me than recreations of existing paradigms, even if some features are sacrificed (e.g. cash deposits, in the banking example). The geographically-hierarchical systems we rely on currently evolved based on their useful properties of being communication- and computation-efficient. That is, holding elections which satisfy the Smith criterion [0] or offer Byzantine tolerance [1] would be difficult to achieve if all you have is paper, pencil, and Pony Express. It also supports why elections are held relatively infrequently -- sending politicians overland to gather together to perform some kind of in-person consensus mechanism (e.g. quorum establishment) isn't something you want to do all the time. We have back-justified this system with the rationalization that local leaders best reflect the concerns of their community, but this is an enormous simplification -- essentially, it takes the preference space of the electorate (all the issues they care about), embeds it down to one dimension (the list of candidates), and then re-projects it back to the higher space (the candidate's stances). Preserving the feature space by holding more frequent elections [2], or allowing users to choose which features they care about through issue-based vote delegation [3], would be more interesting to me. To go back to the previous point, as complexity increases, trust becomes more difficult to grow, and existing mechanisms also have thousands of years as a head-start. It will take time, but I hope that people will be open-minded enough to try it at some point in the future. Maybe it will be as low-stakes as how to stock the office fridge, or which equipment to purchase for the local park. But these are the kinds of baby steps that will eventually enable better governance systems. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_criterion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_criterion [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-direct_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-direct_democracy [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy

dmitriid 6y ago

> allowing for only the individuals involved in the transaction to know who they voted for. So you want a backdoor, but "only for individuals who voted to know only their vote"? That... that doesn't work.

dboreham 6y ago
Do you mean doesn't work in an algorithmic sense, or in the sense that the voter can be bludgeoned into allowing someone else to use that capability?
- dmitriid 6y ago
  Once you have a backdoor, everyone has the backdoor.
meowkit 6y ago
Zero knowledge proofs are the solution for verifying a vote was counted correctly without revealing what the vote actually was.
- dmitriid 6y ago
  This still doesn't help, does it? If I can verify that I voted, and my vote counted for something, doesn't mean that the entire vote was counted correctly, or that everyone voted as they are saying they voted, or that a "corrupt government"[1] didn't flood the vote with their own fake votes. [1] "Corrupt government officials" is the inevitable straw man in any blockchain discussions.