5 ms·

> Blockchain voting is how we get a world where no one trusts the results of elections because very few people have the knowledge and experience to understand a

by darawk 5y ago

> Blockchain voting is how we get a world where no one trusts the results of elections because very few people have the knowledge and experience to understand and audit such a system. You mean as opposed to the current system that so many people understand and audit?

heavyset_go 5y ago
> You mean as opposed to the current system that so many people understand and audit? Yes, we already have a trust problem with one of the simplest methods of voting, and the implication is that mathematical obfuscation via cryptography and blockchains can make the trust problem even worse.
- mewpmewp2 5y ago
  Realistically how often lay people who distrust the system currently audit the votes?
  - heavyset_go 5y ago
    The last election had volunteers from both sides of the aisle count votes, while a ton of normal people watched them as observers. Last year, we saw a lot of Trump supporters who were convinced the election was stolen act as election observers. The process is easy for them to engage in, as well as to observe, because they're literally just counting votes. Anyone can observe and see for themselves that nothing nefarious is going on, and they don't need to be experts to do so.
    - darawk 5y ago
      > The last election had volunteers from both sides of the aisle count votes, while a ton of normal people watched them as observers. Last year, we saw a lot of Trump supporters who were convinced the election was stolen act as election observers. The process is easy for them to engage in, as well as to observe, because they're literally just counting votes. Anyone can observe and see for themselves that nothing nefarious is going on, and they don't need to be experts to do so. And how did all that work out for public trust in elections? The problem here is that, even if you personally can go validate your local election, anyone can just claim the fraud was somewhere else. A cryptographic voting system allows any citizen to validate the entire election. The value of this is very significant. Right now a right wing website can just claim say, the CA elections were riddled with fraud. The only way to even approach "disproving" that is to request data from the city/state officials...who those people do not trust in the first place. A publicly auditable voting system would short circuit all of those issues. It doesn't need to be interpretable to every single person. What it does need to have is no specific plausible fraud narrative. Right now Trump et al can simply claim ballot stuffing, or any number of other kinds of fraud. Disproving that requires access to records that most people cannot obtain, and so the narrative can retain credibility for those disposed to believing it. It's true that most people will not understand the cryptography underlying an auditable voting system, but they don't need to. In order for someone to implant a fraud narrative, they will need to come up with an explanation for how the fraud occurred. Once they do that, it will be relatively straightforward to debunk those narratives in a clear way, that, critically, does not rely on faith in trusted third parties.
      - acdha 5y ago
        > A cryptographic voting system allows any citizen to validate the entire election. Really? Think about what we saw when the Republicans tried to claim the 2020 election was rigged and ask how a massively complex distributed system would change that. When someone argues that fake or dead people voted, the blockchain doesn’t help – you can show transactions but that doesn’t and cannot show that they were made by people who were eligible voters, and privacy makes it important that this never change. This is the same reason why blockchain systems like supply chain management fail: if you trust a third-party, you don’t need a blockchain. If you don’t, layering overhead on top won’t change that. Similarly, I really don’t see how the argument that people don’t need to understand cryptography to trust the system. You’re talking a massive, complex software system run in thousands of locations and, as we’ve seen, absence of evidence will simply be cited as proof that people covered their tracks well. Look at how many people believed conspiracies based on the hex gibberish or Windows security settings which various Trump acolytes were pushing — they had no trouble coming up with explanations which many people believe long after the subsequent debunkings. The underlying problem is that a blockchain system still depends on trusted third parties. You need to verify that someone is eligible to vote and that their vote was accurately recorded. Think about all of the claims over the years about machines recording votes for a different candidate than the user selected, moving buttons right before someone clicked, etc. – there’s no way to solve that by adding more software. Did a bunch of people get bused in to vote for someone else? A blockchain cannot solve that – you need a trusted third party, and calling them an oracle doesn’t mean that’s not what they are. What does work is the current system: the fact that bipartisan witnesses watched people being checked against voter rolls, paper being counted, and recounted, etc. meant that most people accepted the results. It’s not perfect but it works well and the fact that it’s distributed means that flaws or cheating don’t scale the way a digital system would. The danger we face now is from ideologues perjuring themselves, and a blockchain won’t change that because the problem is that they don’t want to accept the results and are actively trying to subvert the system. A blockchain won’t help with the new rules being put into place to allow political interference or suppress voters, but it will distract from the things which might.
        darawk 5y ago
- ryandvm 5y ago
  Agreed. The lack of trust in the 2020 election isn't because the voters have a reason not to trust it, it's because they have a need to not trust it - a psychological need. And they'll follow the flimsiest of evidence to fulfill that need. Obfuscating the election results with a cryptographic framework that only PhDs understand (which incidentally, they trust even less than the under-educated) would be a disaster. It would provide the kooks and charlatans with more than enough fodder for all manner of conspiracies. I can just imagine them grepping the blockchain for "666" now...
nuerow 5y ago
> You mean as opposed to the current system that so many people understand and audit? The current system is trivial to explain, understand, and more importantly audit. I defy you to find a simpler, more robust system that the average Joe can and does understand. Meanwhile, it's easy to understand how a complex system involving blockchains can and will be subjected to attacks exploiting it's opacity, or even the fact that it exists only in electronic form. Let's put it this way: attackers even try to attack the very existence and legitimacy of boxes of paper ballots that are always on display and protected by security forces.
- hatware 5y ago
  Sounds like a lot of hand-waving to make things seem simple, when they in fact are not.
- darawk 5y ago
  I don't understand all the details of our voting system. Maybe you do. But how exactly our system secures itself is quite complex, and I think the evidence for that was pretty straightforwardly demonstrated in the last year. The claims Donald Trump made about the election were false. But why, exactly, they were false is extremely difficult to explain, and honestly impossible for the average person to validate. The promise of blockchain voting is that a sufficiently motivated private individual could validate the entire election. That is presently not physically possible in our system.

by darawk 5y ago

heavyset_go 5y ago

> You mean as opposed to the current system that so many people understand and audit? Yes, we already have a trust problem with one of the simplest methods of voting, and the implication is that mathematical obfuscation via cryptography and blockchains can make the trust problem even worse.

mewpmewp2 5y ago
Realistically how often lay people who distrust the system currently audit the votes?
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  The last election had volunteers from both sides of the aisle count votes, while a ton of normal people watched them as observers. Last year, we saw a lot of Trump supporters who were convinced the election was stolen act as election observers. The process is easy for them to engage in, as well as to observe, because they're literally just counting votes. Anyone can observe and see for themselves that nothing nefarious is going on, and they don't need to be experts to do so.
  - darawk 5y ago
    > The last election had volunteers from both sides of the aisle count votes, while a ton of normal people watched them as observers. Last year, we saw a lot of Trump supporters who were convinced the election was stolen act as election observers. The process is easy for them to engage in, as well as to observe, because they're literally just counting votes. Anyone can observe and see for themselves that nothing nefarious is going on, and they don't need to be experts to do so. And how did all that work out for public trust in elections? The problem here is that, even if you personally can go validate your local election, anyone can just claim the fraud was somewhere else. A cryptographic voting system allows any citizen to validate the entire election. The value of this is very significant. Right now a right wing website can just claim say, the CA elections were riddled with fraud. The only way to even approach "disproving" that is to request data from the city/state officials...who those people do not trust in the first place. A publicly auditable voting system would short circuit all of those issues. It doesn't need to be interpretable to every single person. What it does need to have is no specific plausible fraud narrative. Right now Trump et al can simply claim ballot stuffing, or any number of other kinds of fraud. Disproving that requires access to records that most people cannot obtain, and so the narrative can retain credibility for those disposed to believing it. It's true that most people will not understand the cryptography underlying an auditable voting system, but they don't need to. In order for someone to implant a fraud narrative, they will need to come up with an explanation for how the fraud occurred. Once they do that, it will be relatively straightforward to debunk those narratives in a clear way, that, critically, does not rely on faith in trusted third parties.
    - acdha 5y ago
      > A cryptographic voting system allows any citizen to validate the entire election. Really? Think about what we saw when the Republicans tried to claim the 2020 election was rigged and ask how a massively complex distributed system would change that. When someone argues that fake or dead people voted, the blockchain doesn’t help – you can show transactions but that doesn’t and cannot show that they were made by people who were eligible voters, and privacy makes it important that this never change. This is the same reason why blockchain systems like supply chain management fail: if you trust a third-party, you don’t need a blockchain. If you don’t, layering overhead on top won’t change that. Similarly, I really don’t see how the argument that people don’t need to understand cryptography to trust the system. You’re talking a massive, complex software system run in thousands of locations and, as we’ve seen, absence of evidence will simply be cited as proof that people covered their tracks well. Look at how many people believed conspiracies based on the hex gibberish or Windows security settings which various Trump acolytes were pushing — they had no trouble coming up with explanations which many people believe long after the subsequent debunkings. The underlying problem is that a blockchain system still depends on trusted third parties. You need to verify that someone is eligible to vote and that their vote was accurately recorded. Think about all of the claims over the years about machines recording votes for a different candidate than the user selected, moving buttons right before someone clicked, etc. – there’s no way to solve that by adding more software. Did a bunch of people get bused in to vote for someone else? A blockchain cannot solve that – you need a trusted third party, and calling them an oracle doesn’t mean that’s not what they are. What does work is the current system: the fact that bipartisan witnesses watched people being checked against voter rolls, paper being counted, and recounted, etc. meant that most people accepted the results. It’s not perfect but it works well and the fact that it’s distributed means that flaws or cheating don’t scale the way a digital system would. The danger we face now is from ideologues perjuring themselves, and a blockchain won’t change that because the problem is that they don’t want to accept the results and are actively trying to subvert the system. A blockchain won’t help with the new rules being put into place to allow political interference or suppress voters, but it will distract from the things which might.
      - darawk 5y ago
ryandvm 5y ago
Agreed. The lack of trust in the 2020 election isn't because the voters have a reason not to trust it, it's because they have a need to not trust it - a psychological need. And they'll follow the flimsiest of evidence to fulfill that need. Obfuscating the election results with a cryptographic framework that only PhDs understand (which incidentally, they trust even less than the under-educated) would be a disaster. It would provide the kooks and charlatans with more than enough fodder for all manner of conspiracies. I can just imagine them grepping the blockchain for "666" now...

nuerow 5y ago

> You mean as opposed to the current system that so many people understand and audit? The current system is trivial to explain, understand, and more importantly audit. I defy you to find a simpler, more robust system that the average Joe can and does understand. Meanwhile, it's easy to understand how a complex system involving blockchains can and will be subjected to attacks exploiting it's opacity, or even the fact that it exists only in electronic form. Let's put it this way: attackers even try to attack the very existence and legitimacy of boxes of paper ballots that are always on display and protected by security forces.

hatware 5y ago
Sounds like a lot of hand-waving to make things seem simple, when they in fact are not.
darawk 5y ago
I don't understand all the details of our voting system. Maybe you do. But how exactly our system secures itself is quite complex, and I think the evidence for that was pretty straightforwardly demonstrated in the last year. The claims Donald Trump made about the election were false. But why, exactly, they were false is extremely difficult to explain, and honestly impossible for the average person to validate. The promise of blockchain voting is that a sufficiently motivated private individual could validate the entire election. That is presently not physically possible in our system.