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'Public voting' is not a technological problem but political one. There's a lot of opposition to making voting more accessible to everyone. Voting should be eas

'Public voting' is not a technological problem but political one. There's a lot of opposition to making voting more accessible to everyone. Voting should be easy, and you don't need blockchain for that but maybe it could help. The question is who wants "voting rights".

tsimionescu 5y ago
Unfortunately, trust in voting can only be achieved with paper voting, there is no technological solution to improve it that doesn't completely remove trust as well.
- shrimpx 5y ago
  Trust as in the public trusting the vote? I'm afraid you can put political spin on and create distrust in pretty much anything.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Of course, the public can mistrust a paper vote, for good or bad reasons. But, it's not possible to reasonably trust an electronic voting system - the people installing and maintaining the system have myriad ways to manipulate the vote that are almost impossible to discover or prove (at least as long as you don't accept public voting, which has different issues).
    - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
      There are many different ways to construct an electronic voting system. What you are describing is a traditional, centralized electronic voting system. There are electronic voting systems out there that provide certain guarantees without the need to trust.
      - acdha 5y ago
        No, there aren’t. There are systems designed to solve the problem of the inventor not getting paid by election officials but voting is an extremely hard problem once you learn about it and safe electronic voting is unsolved. The big challenge is that it needs to be anonymous even in the case of attacks. Electronic systems offer many ways to cheat which you may have thought about in the context of making purchases but voting also needs to deal with unique problems like changing votes or coercion. If I buy a coffee, I don’t care if the owner alters their database as long as I get my coffee. I also don’t have a reason to fear that charge showing up on my statement but most proposed systems re-enable old attacks where, say, your boss/union/neighborhood crime leader/etc. could use the verification mechanism to confirm that you voted the way they told you to. Paper ballots are the best system known because the system is easy to understand and doesn’t require huge amounts of trust. We just went through this in the United States where the leader of the country backed by a multibillion dollar propaganda machine tried to claim fraud but lost repeatedly because there was no plausible way to have altered or replaced paper ballots at scale. Electronic systems would have made it much easier to cast that doubt because the babble they tried about hacks would have been harder to disprove for the average voter and there would have been far more leeway for a partisan judge to find doubt.
        baobabKoodaa 5y ago
        > No, there aren’t. Yes there are, and I've documented several of them here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/ https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/ If you disagree, can you please be specific what exactly do you disagree about?
        acdha 5y ago
        That shows that in-person paper ballots are superior once you correct the system in Finland (P6/7 would normally be green for in person paper). More importantly, however, it’s a mistake to give all of those equal weight. For example, if married couples vote together a spouse can monitor or coerce their partner’s choice but that doesn’t scale up better than linearly, whereas all electronic systems which don’t rely on voter-verified paper ballots are subject to very hard to disprove allegations of widespread fraud. This is the conceptual problem to the very clever mathematical approaches: even if they are theoretically sound, it is much harder to build public confidence in a system which a fraction of a percent of the population understands.
    - shrimpx 5y ago
      But why wouldn't ballot handlers swap out paper votes, etc.? You can rig anything with improper safeguards.
      - acdha 5y ago
        The difference is scale: if you’re doing something funny with paper ballots you need a conspiracy involving a LOT of people shipping things around, disposing of the correct ones, etc. Trying to monitor people’s votes similarly requires something like cameras in a lot of places. Software systems make all of that possible at scale with far fewer people, and thus much more plausibly possible to keep secret.
      - tsimionescu 5y ago
        Outside the huge difference of scale that another commenter mentioned, there is also the difference of how easy it is to ensure this doesn't happen. For paper voting, in many countries, each party participating in the vote will have members observing every step of the process - the voting rooms, the local ballot counts, the vote transport, the regional and global vote tallies. Additionally, every citizen and even foreign independent observers has/have the right to do the same. And, since the system is dead simple, they each have the actual ability to tell if nothing was tampered. The same thing is in no way true for electronic voting. Giving everyone access to personally inspect the electronic equipment at any level of detail is difficult logistically, and also very likely to result in damage. Even if you were able to, vanishingly few people could actually convince even themseoves that the systems are not tampered with.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  In person paper voting specifically. And that also really have many other things involved...
- V__ 5y ago
  Obligatory Tom Scott videos: Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea - Computerphile | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
- baobabKoodaa 5y ago
  Removing trust completely is a pretty high bar... but there are different voting schemes out there and some of them do a pretty good job of removing a lot of the trust. Cryptography is typically involved, but blockchain is not needed. I wrote more about this here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/ https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Here by "remove trust" I didn't mean "trust-less assurance that voting is correct", I meant "you have no reason to trust that the system recorded your vote correctly". A basic problem with electronic & cryptographic voting systems is that it is impossible for a non-expert to convince themselves that the system is working correctly. In-person paper voting has this property by virtue of the simplicity of the system and the ability for regular people to observe it's working. This also normally includes members of all political parties participating in the vote, giving a high degree of confidence that either (a) the voting was correct, or (b) the parties you voted for are colluding, so the result is meaningless anyway.
    - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
      You write as if there is only one voting scheme for in-person paper voting, and as if laypersons by and large trust the results of paper voting elections. Neither of these claims is true. First of all, there is more than one in-person paper voting system, and some in-person paper voting systems involve cryptography. Secondly, layperson DO NOT by and large trust the results of paper voting elections. You don't need to look further than the previous presidential election in the U.S., in which a significant portion of votes were cast on paper ballots, and a large portion of the population STILL does not trust that those votes were counted correctly. And if you look at developing countries handling their own paper ballot elections, you will find out that many of those elections are manipulated, and people do not trust the results. That said, I agree with your general sentiment that adding electronic and cryptographic elements to a voting scheme will make that scheme generally "less understandable" to a layperson, such that they need to defer to "expert opinion" on whether that voting scheme can be trusted. However, it's not a binary thing like you make it out to be; people do not 100% trust your chosen paper voting scheme and 0% trust your chosen electronic voting scheme. Anyway, I feel like "how do we get people to trust the results of the election more than they currently do" is a secondary problem. The main problem is how we can actually secure the results of the election while maintaining ballot secrecy. It's more important.

tsimionescu 5y ago

Unfortunately, trust in voting can only be achieved with paper voting, there is no technological solution to improve it that doesn't completely remove trust as well.

shrimpx 5y ago
Trust as in the public trusting the vote? I'm afraid you can put political spin on and create distrust in pretty much anything.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Of course, the public can mistrust a paper vote, for good or bad reasons. But, it's not possible to reasonably trust an electronic voting system - the people installing and maintaining the system have myriad ways to manipulate the vote that are almost impossible to discover or prove (at least as long as you don't accept public voting, which has different issues).
  - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
    There are many different ways to construct an electronic voting system. What you are describing is a traditional, centralized electronic voting system. There are electronic voting systems out there that provide certain guarantees without the need to trust.
    - acdha 5y ago
      No, there aren’t. There are systems designed to solve the problem of the inventor not getting paid by election officials but voting is an extremely hard problem once you learn about it and safe electronic voting is unsolved. The big challenge is that it needs to be anonymous even in the case of attacks. Electronic systems offer many ways to cheat which you may have thought about in the context of making purchases but voting also needs to deal with unique problems like changing votes or coercion. If I buy a coffee, I don’t care if the owner alters their database as long as I get my coffee. I also don’t have a reason to fear that charge showing up on my statement but most proposed systems re-enable old attacks where, say, your boss/union/neighborhood crime leader/etc. could use the verification mechanism to confirm that you voted the way they told you to. Paper ballots are the best system known because the system is easy to understand and doesn’t require huge amounts of trust. We just went through this in the United States where the leader of the country backed by a multibillion dollar propaganda machine tried to claim fraud but lost repeatedly because there was no plausible way to have altered or replaced paper ballots at scale. Electronic systems would have made it much easier to cast that doubt because the babble they tried about hacks would have been harder to disprove for the average voter and there would have been far more leeway for a partisan judge to find doubt.
      - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
        > No, there aren’t. Yes there are, and I've documented several of them here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/ https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/ If you disagree, can you please be specific what exactly do you disagree about?
        acdha 5y ago
        That shows that in-person paper ballots are superior once you correct the system in Finland (P6/7 would normally be green for in person paper). More importantly, however, it’s a mistake to give all of those equal weight. For example, if married couples vote together a spouse can monitor or coerce their partner’s choice but that doesn’t scale up better than linearly, whereas all electronic systems which don’t rely on voter-verified paper ballots are subject to very hard to disprove allegations of widespread fraud. This is the conceptual problem to the very clever mathematical approaches: even if they are theoretically sound, it is much harder to build public confidence in a system which a fraction of a percent of the population understands.
  - shrimpx 5y ago
    But why wouldn't ballot handlers swap out paper votes, etc.? You can rig anything with improper safeguards.
    - acdha 5y ago
      The difference is scale: if you’re doing something funny with paper ballots you need a conspiracy involving a LOT of people shipping things around, disposing of the correct ones, etc. Trying to monitor people’s votes similarly requires something like cameras in a lot of places. Software systems make all of that possible at scale with far fewer people, and thus much more plausibly possible to keep secret.
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      Outside the huge difference of scale that another commenter mentioned, there is also the difference of how easy it is to ensure this doesn't happen. For paper voting, in many countries, each party participating in the vote will have members observing every step of the process - the voting rooms, the local ballot counts, the vote transport, the regional and global vote tallies. Additionally, every citizen and even foreign independent observers has/have the right to do the same. And, since the system is dead simple, they each have the actual ability to tell if nothing was tampered. The same thing is in no way true for electronic voting. Giving everyone access to personally inspect the electronic equipment at any level of detail is difficult logistically, and also very likely to result in damage. Even if you were able to, vanishingly few people could actually convince even themseoves that the systems are not tampered with.
Ekaros 5y ago
In person paper voting specifically. And that also really have many other things involved...
V__ 5y ago
Obligatory Tom Scott videos: Why Electronic Voting is a BAD Idea - Computerphile | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI Why Electronic Voting Is Still A Bad Idea | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs
baobabKoodaa 5y ago
Removing trust completely is a pretty high bar... but there are different voting schemes out there and some of them do a pretty good job of removing a lot of the trust. Cryptography is typically involved, but blockchain is not needed. I wrote more about this here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/ https://www.attejuvonen.fi/thesis/
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Here by "remove trust" I didn't mean "trust-less assurance that voting is correct", I meant "you have no reason to trust that the system recorded your vote correctly". A basic problem with electronic & cryptographic voting systems is that it is impossible for a non-expert to convince themselves that the system is working correctly. In-person paper voting has this property by virtue of the simplicity of the system and the ability for regular people to observe it's working. This also normally includes members of all political parties participating in the vote, giving a high degree of confidence that either (a) the voting was correct, or (b) the parties you voted for are colluding, so the result is meaningless anyway.
  - baobabKoodaa 5y ago
    You write as if there is only one voting scheme for in-person paper voting, and as if laypersons by and large trust the results of paper voting elections. Neither of these claims is true. First of all, there is more than one in-person paper voting system, and some in-person paper voting systems involve cryptography. Secondly, layperson DO NOT by and large trust the results of paper voting elections. You don't need to look further than the previous presidential election in the U.S., in which a significant portion of votes were cast on paper ballots, and a large portion of the population STILL does not trust that those votes were counted correctly. And if you look at developing countries handling their own paper ballot elections, you will find out that many of those elections are manipulated, and people do not trust the results. That said, I agree with your general sentiment that adding electronic and cryptographic elements to a voting scheme will make that scheme generally "less understandable" to a layperson, such that they need to defer to "expert opinion" on whether that voting scheme can be trusted. However, it's not a binary thing like you make it out to be; people do not 100% trust your chosen paper voting scheme and 0% trust your chosen electronic voting scheme. Anyway, I feel like "how do we get people to trust the results of the election more than they currently do" is a secondary problem. The main problem is how we can actually secure the results of the election while maintaining ballot secrecy. It's more important.