8 ms·

I am not familiar with Debian's practices, but electronic voting can't work for a nation because: - centralization (there must be a central, corruptible place

• charcircuit 5y ago
  Electronic voting systems using zero knowledge proofs are superior to paper votes because it's possible to check for yourself that your vote was actually counted and not ignored. Paper voting is extremely expensive to scale compared to a website that lets you vote. Everyone could get a notification on their phone when they are asked to vote on something as opposed to having to fill out paper and send it somewhere to be counted.
  • qsort 5y ago
    Paper voting ensures privacy and voter verification, something even the best electronic solutions can't properly handle. No thanks, I can actually show up and vote once every few years.
    • touisteur 5y ago
      I agree. I don't understand the argument of reducing cost of elections and scaling. The current paper system in place in most works (at least in European countries where I've witnessed the process) and doesn't need to scale more. If actors in a democracy can't afford such a system, and the occasional (once, twice a year) walk to the voting place, 15 minutes wait and fellow-citizen interaction, can't we accept they don't care for voting and participating and stop listening? I'm all for accommodation of special cases (people with reduced mobility or unability to be in contact with other people) but we already have the necessary systems in place (mail-in or vote delegation). Literally one of the last places I'd check for change or optimization. It works, leave it alone, I'll happily pay the 3 or 10eur a year.
      • throwaway48375 5y ago
        American here and I have had to wait >2 hours to vote multiple times. In the worst instance someone tried to illegally close the polling place even though people were still lined up outside. This is in clear violation of state law. So long as you are lined up to vote before the polling place closes they have to take your vote. To the sheriff's department credit (they are generally terrible) the deputy who responded refused to make people leave and told the worker they had to stay open. When I lived in a more rural area of the same county I would just walk in and vote within a couple minutes. I'm sure it isn't broken by design though.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
        • monetus 5y ago
          live in a metropolis? -also american but in a midsized city and ~15 minutes is more than the average wait.
          • adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
            What that means is that you don't live in a city in a republican state. For the past couple decades, the GOP has gotten increasingly brazen about reducing the number of polling places for the people they don't want to vote.
            • monetus 5y ago
              Tennessee. I think I might incredibly be in a low traffic part of town despite it being a huge commercial sector with surrounding suburbs.
        • iso1210 5y ago
          > American here and I have had to wait >2 hours to vote multiple times. That doesn't have to be the case though, that's a political decision to staff voting booths like that. It's also trivial to fix.
    • charcircuit 5y ago
      >Paper voting ensures privacy So do ZKP based voting systems. >voter verification What do you mean by this? If you mean signatures you can have people sign their signature on their phone or desktop. >I can actually show up and vote once every few years This is a lot of friction which prevents many people from voting.
      • gjulianm 5y ago
        > So do ZKP based voting systems. Assuming no vulnerabilities on the ZKP system, a perfect implementation and no information leak from other sources. > What do you mean by this? I assume that ensuring that the person voting is who they claim they are. If someone steals the certificates of that person, they could impersonate them. > This is a lot of friction which prevents many people from voting. In Spain (and I guess in a lot of other countries) voting in-person means walking to the closest polling center (99% of the time it's less than 10 minute walk) on a Sunday, picking up the paper, doing the queue (maybe another 10 minutes) and walking out. The alternative is mail-in voting, which usually takes a few minutes of walking to the closest post-office, signing some documents and waiting for the ballot to come. Compare that with getting the certificates, storing them securely, downloading the program to do the voting, installing it, praying it works, then using the program and cast the vote. Think of all the people who aren't good with computers, and how easy would it be for them to do all those steps correctly. In the ideal case I agree that electronic voting systems would be better. But the world is not ideal, quite a lot of things can go wrong with them because of their complexity and detecting those issues will be difficult. On the other hand, paper voting is fairly simple, the number of things that can go wrong is low and easy to detect by anyone.
        • codedokode 5y ago
          Government-issued certificates for electronic voting are a terrible solution because it is trivial to generate millions of certificates for fictious voters and vote in their name.
      • XorNot 5y ago
        Friction to prevent people from voting is a US phenomenon where voting participation (i.e. turning up and declaring something, even if it is an abstention) is not considered a legal obligation - and thus, the lack of participation is not viewed as a possible attempt to interfere with democracy.
  • ilammy 5y ago
    > zero knowledge proofs are [...] possible to check for yourself Only if you're an expert cryptographer, else you're deferring to the authority. > Paper voting is extremely expensive to scale That's a feature.
    • rosndo 5y ago
      > Only if you're an expert cryptographer, else you're deferring to the authority. At least it’s still provable, a plenty of people can afford to hire their own cryptographers to do verification. Foreign observers can also do the same.
      • gjulianm 5y ago
        Paper voting is provable too. Vote and then observe the counting which is usually public. You can take a look at the box to ensure that it hasn't been tampered with.
        • rosndo 5y ago
          Paper voting is vulnerable to basic sleight of hand, and your ability to effectively monitor the count is somewhat limited. Electronic voting can be much better, but it is of course not a terribly easy problem to solve. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe that paper voting is particularly problematic. But I do think that electronic voting could make voting easier and more accessible.
          • gjulianm 5y ago
            I don't know how vote counting is done in other places, but I've seen it in my country and it's not vulnerable to basic sleight of hand, at least not for more than one or two votes. Poll workers are all citizens randomly selected, the president of each table takes envelopes from a transparent box, opens them, shows them to the other three or four workers of the table (plus any observers that want to be there) and declares the content of the vote. > But I do think that electronic voting could make voting easier and more accessible. I don't think so. Think of all the people who have difficulty with basic computer/phone tasks, either because of knowledge or accessibility issues. Do you think all the steps to securely cast votes with an electronic system are going to be easier and more accessible for them?
  • grumbel 5y ago
    > it's possible to check for yourself that your vote was actually counted and not ignored. That's a bug, not a feature. The point of not doing that with paper voting is that it makes selling your vote difficult, as nobody else can verify what you voted for. You on the other side know that you put the ballot in the box and can stay around to see if the votes in the box get accurately counted. With electronic voting you lose that. You either have to blindly trust the system or by allowing vote verification make it easy for others to sell the votes.
    • charcircuit 5y ago
      >That's a bug, not a feature It's a trade off. I want to be able to prove that my vote was counted. How can I trust that my voice was actually heard by the system? >as nobody else can verify what you voted for. You can mitigate this problem by giving people a way to fake any vote outcome. The voter knows how to verify their actual vote, but someone else would not be sure if what they verified was real or fake. Also I doubt this type of buying votes with verification is that big of an actual thing. You can trivially do it with paper voting to by just asking them to stream themself voting or by taking a picture of their ballot. >You either have to blindly trust the system Having someone else count votes without the ability for you yourself to count votes and check to see if your vote was included is the opposite of blindly trusting the system.
      • gjulianm 5y ago
        > How can I trust that my voice was actually heard by the system? Most vote countings are public. I can go to my polling place, cast my vote, check that nobody tampers with the box, watch how they count every vote correctly, ensure that the written tallies are correct, and then verify that the central system tallies match with those I counted.
        • mw888 5y ago
          Great, ZKProofs present the possibility for everyone to do better than that with much less work.
  • M2Ys4U 5y ago
    > Electronic voting systems using zero knowledge proofs are superior to paper votes because it's possible to check for yourself that your vote was actually counted and not ignored. Which means somebody can hold a gun to your head and force you to prove that you voted and that your vote counted. That is not, to put it mildly, desirable in an election.
    • charcircuit 5y ago
      You can already do that with mail in ballots easily. Someone could also threaten you to record yourself filling out a paper ballot.
      • M2Ys4U 5y ago
        Yes, which is why I also dislike postal voting and want to minimise its use.
        • teagoat 5y ago
          What does postal voting have to do with that? they could also force you to film yourself at a polling station...
          • M2Ys4U 5y ago
            Well at least where I live (the UK), it's illegal to film in a polling station and the staff in the polling stations should be looking out for that and reporting it. More importantly (with both postal voting and in-person voting) it's impossible to perform these attacks after the fact, but if you have a receipt of your vote it can be done at any time after you vote.
      • danuker 5y ago
        Unless they also demand that you film yourself continuously up to putting the envelope in a mailbox, they can't be sure you actually mailed the ballot or that you didn't invalidate the result later. This would risk exposing yourself, and in turn, the intimidator. But if only one ballot is mailed per citizen, they can be reasonably sure you didn't vote for the competition.
  • codedokode 5y ago
    Electronic voting is very difficult to monitor and verify independently, especially when voter lists are not publicly available. It is difficult to verify whether turnout number is correct, and on the countrary it is easy to add millions of fictious voters and vote for them. > it's possible to check for yourself that your vote was actually counted and not ignored. Let's say you voted for candidate A and didn't find your vote. How can you prove that you really voted for A? > Everyone could get a notification on their phone when they are asked to vote on something as opposed to having to fill out paper and send it somewhere to be counted. Voting with such system is equivalent to publishing results without any actual voting.
    • serenitylater 5y ago
    • JanisErdmanis 5y ago
      > Let's say you voted for candidate A and didn't find your vote. How can you prove that you really voted for A? With ZKP it would look something as follows: 1. Encrypt a vote with a commonly known public key and publish it to the bulletin board. 2. Shuffle the votes and producing a ZKP proof of correctness assuring that only votes from bulletin board where shuffled, no vote were added, removed or modified. 3. Tally the votes and produce a proof of correct decryption. The argument is that since authorities does not know the choice of the voter they would accept the vote to the authenticated and public bulletin board which would prevent vote omission.
      • codedokode 5y ago
        I didn't understand the algorithm completely (for example, whether you post your vote anonymously or under your name, and where is the private key for the public key you mentioned). Let's say bulletin board software replaces the vote with 20% probability. You post your vote for candidate A and see that it didn't appear on the board (because the board replaced it with vote for candidate B, but you don't know about it). How can you prove that you tried to vote for A and not for B? The records show that you have voted, and as voting is anonymous it is impossible to know how you voted. Of course, there are other ways to meddle with such election. For example, you see that the turnout is 99%. How can you verify this number? The government refuses to publish a list of voters because GDPR doesn't allow that. And even if the country publishes this list how you can verify that the list doesn't contain fictious voters?
  • iso1210 5y ago
    > Paper voting is extremely expensive to scale And thus is impossible to hack at scale. It costs $x to run an election and count the votes for Y thousand peple voting for a position, that scales pretty much linearly - have 1 ballot and 1,000 votes costing say $100, have 1 ballot and 1 million votes and it costs no more than $100,000
    • mariusor 5y ago
      > And thus is impossible to hack at scale. I think numerous cases of electoral fraud over the course of global history prove this statement wrong.
• jffry 5y ago
  The US is not homogenous in the technology used to vote - running elections is left to the states, and different states use different polling technologies. The systems we have for voting in Washington DC seem to be a best-of-both-worlds approach. There are touchscreen kiosks that you use to make your choices, then the kiosk prints out a properly marked paper ballot that it asks you to verify. Then you take your ballot over to the normal scanning machines. You can also request an unmarked ballot and fill it by hand if you prefer. The kiosks can provide a wide range of assistive tech (larger fonts, instructions in a variety of languages, and headphone jack for audio prompts). They also help ensure you do not miss a question - you must explicitly choose "skip" - and they help ensure you select between 0 and N choices in choose-N questions. Also they print a clearly-marked ballot which helps avoid ambiguities like if somebody partially fills a circle by hand. And best of all, the end product is still a physical, auditable piece of paper.
  • pmoriarty 5y ago
    This is all pretty meaningless if the vote counting is still done by machine. The US should go back to hand-counted pen and paper voting.
    • meatmanek 5y ago
      If you suspect a problem with the vote-counting machines, you can audit the paper votes with pen and paper. But in the cases where there isn't much reason to doubt the outcome of the election, you can save the cost of all that labor by letting a machine do something machines do really well.
      • Teever 5y ago
        I highly doubt the assertion that spending money on buying and maintaining voting machines will ever exceed the cost savings from not paying people to count paper ballots.
• charlieok 5y ago
  While not built for the purpose of voting, there have occasionally been some coin-weighted polls using the Zcash blockchain. The ability to post encrypted and immutable transactions, and selectively share viewing keys has interesting possibilities, certainly. That said, we in the Zcash community have usually used another system when holding secret-ballot votes within our community: Helios. https://vote.heliosvoting.org/ https://vote.heliosvoting.org/
• Spooky23 5y ago
  Electronic voting does not require centralization. Elections are administered at the county level. This isn’t a rocket science problem. Best bet is to set mandatory requirements that machines must meet to get federal funding, let companies compete. Security people tend to hand wave about election tally machines because it gets eyeballs. The reality is they work mostly fine, and the risks associated with them are usually more about process than nerd stuff.
• mariusor 5y ago
  I do not think that we have investigated electronic voting enough to be able to say it's not feasible with such certainty. I wouldn't start with national high stakes ballots, but I'm confident that if enough smart people put their mind to it, a solution is possible.
  • atq2119 5y ago
    The problem isn't one of technology but one of procurement processes. Electronic voting is largely a solution in search of a problem (purely manual processes work fine for tallying votes), and so the field is dominated by bad actors selling whatever to clueless politicians.