6 ms·

> 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

> 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.
    - codedokode 5y ago
      With paper voting you can see that there are real people casting votes. With electronic voting it is trivial to add fictious voters and vote for them, especially in countries where voter lists are not published.
    - johannes1234321 5y ago
      Less work isn't the optimisation goal, though. Reliability, trust, verifiability, secret ballot, etc. is what it is about. If things can be made more efficient without sacrificing the primary goals ok, but if I as a citizen can't verify the results anymore (by watching the count etc.) the purpose isn't met.
      - mw888 5y ago
        It seems like you don’t and don’t care to, understand.
    - gjulianm 5y ago
      Tell that to the people who now, instead of just going to a polling place and placing a paper on an envelope, have to download and store digital certificates, possibly download and install new programs and deal with the troubles of all that, just so "verifying votes" is slightly easier for the minority of people with the knowledge of the system and ZK proofs. Also, you're assuming the system is perfectly implemented. In reality, such a system will be complex, will have many more pieces than the ZK system itself (and those pieces will have vulnerabilities), and will require users to do more which will also be prone to errors and vulnerabilities. I don't understand the insistence on electronic voting for elections. It's less transparent to laypeople, offers small benefits and adds significant complexity both in the implementation and use.
    - JaimeThompson 5y ago
      Many in the US think that "they" are lying to us about basic physics so do you think they will accept those proofs?
    - eulenteufel 5y ago
- jlokier 5y ago
  > 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. It's not so much selling votes, as to discourage voter intimidation: The husband forces his wife, the boss forces his subordinates, the local mafia forces their victims to vote a particular way. I don't know the rules in the USA, but in the UK it is generally forbidden to stream yourself voting or take a photo in the polling station. Maintaining the secrecy of ballots is high priority. Someone might still privately take that picture of their ballot paper, after all there's a private voting booth; the officials wouldn't know. You're allowed to say you made a mistake and ask for a replacement ballot paper, so you could show your boss the version they want to see, and then vote differently.
  - iso1210 5y ago
    > I don't know the rules in the USA, but in the UK it is generally forbidden to stream yourself voting or take a photo in the polling station. Maintaining the secrecy of ballots is high priority. Except we allow postal voting pretty much willy nilly, especailly in areas where intimidation can happen
    - jlokier 5y ago
      That's due to a trade-off of requirements, to maximise free and fair representation. Lack of postal votes makes the ballot less fair and representative, because it affects people with systematic bias in relevant sub-populations (wealth, working conditions, age, health, etc) and areas. In areas where intimidation can happen... for going to the polling station. (All the intimidator has to do is post menacing guards, soldiers, etc. outside the station or on the routes to it. There are plenty of news reports of this happening in some countries. I'm not aware of this in the UK though.) So the question is whether you get a more fair and representative vote outcome by allowing postal voting, or by disallowing it. The balance of trade-offs has led to UK policy allowing postal votes, encouraging each individual to fill out and seal their vote in private, and use statistical and other investigation methods to look for signs of fraud, while maintaining a high standard of secret ballots when voting in person. That might not be the balance that works best in other countries. In the UK it is said by the Electoral Commission that there is no evidence that postal voting has changed electoral outcomes to date, but some attempts at large scale fraud were discovered and prevented.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  The problem is that it solves a problem that nobody actually has and provides tinder to make a problem that actually exists worse. Political machines exploiting nursing homes, pushing absentee ballots on the elderly, etc are already problematic, and allowing field GOTV teams to collect this type of data in mass is would make expanding these operations in size and scope. You’d also create the new problem of hyper-partisan people crying about voter fraud. You’ll have a bunch of lunatics running around with fake ballot receipts to push whatever narrative they are trying to push. In my state, it’s illegal to take pictures of ballots at the poll, and there are bipartisan poll inspectors that will shut that down if it happens.
mariusor 5y ago
> That's a bug, not a feature. I think you're wrong. A bug would be if you could tell how a vote was cast, not if it was counted.
- naniwaduni 5y ago
  You also want to be able to check if your vote was falsely counted, lest an unscrupulous election operator simply reassign all but a handful of votes to its preferred option. Vote selling is a pretty nasty problem to work around.
  - mariusor 5y ago
    I would normally agree with you, but no voting system today can provide you an answer to this question. The problem of unscrupulous operators can be circumvented if the votes are in a public ledger where the voter can backtrack their vote to the ledger "yes, its' my vote, nobody tempered with it", but the vote in the ledger can not be linked to the voter.
    - naniwaduni 5y ago
      To be clear, the property we want is, broadly speaking, "hard to tamper with (at scale) without getting caught". Ideally we would also catch tampering at small scale, but that's darn close to incompatible with denying vote buying. (A possible resolution is, of course, "well, what's wrong with vote buying between informed consenting adults?" But the unfortunate history shows that our electoral systems must compensate for underinformed coerced voters, and their regulations are written in blood.) Existing voting systems do have a countermeasure, if not a fantastic one: creating a trail of physical artifacts that can be manually audited to verify vote totals, and a roll of accepted votes to compare the count of said physical artifacts against. It's not fantastic because the error rates on those physical artifacts are stupendous, but tampering with votes at scale can then require (a) physical access, which humans are well-equipped to reason about, and (b) generating and destroying big piles of said physical artifact, which is expensive and expensive to hide. The gold standard of tampering with physical elections that we know of is basically denying observers the chance to audit, which is rightly considered suspicious. Tampering with electronic votes at scale does not have these cost properties. We can magnify costs without giving voters the ability to prove their votes to a third party (I am aware there are probabilistic constructions), but all such constructions (a) are much harder for the average voter to reason about than monitoring physical access (humans are quite optimized for monitoring physical access), yet (b) requires voters to actually audit their own votes and report non-inclusion en masse. You can see why this is a non-starter.

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.
  - codedokode 5y ago
    With paper voting you can see that there are real people casting votes. With electronic voting it is trivial to add fictious voters and vote for them, especially in countries where voter lists are not published.
  - johannes1234321 5y ago
    Less work isn't the optimisation goal, though. Reliability, trust, verifiability, secret ballot, etc. is what it is about. If things can be made more efficient without sacrificing the primary goals ok, but if I as a citizen can't verify the results anymore (by watching the count etc.) the purpose isn't met.
    - mw888 5y ago
      It seems like you don’t and don’t care to, understand.
  - gjulianm 5y ago
    Tell that to the people who now, instead of just going to a polling place and placing a paper on an envelope, have to download and store digital certificates, possibly download and install new programs and deal with the troubles of all that, just so "verifying votes" is slightly easier for the minority of people with the knowledge of the system and ZK proofs. Also, you're assuming the system is perfectly implemented. In reality, such a system will be complex, will have many more pieces than the ZK system itself (and those pieces will have vulnerabilities), and will require users to do more which will also be prone to errors and vulnerabilities. I don't understand the insistence on electronic voting for elections. It's less transparent to laypeople, offers small benefits and adds significant complexity both in the implementation and use.
  - JaimeThompson 5y ago
    Many in the US think that "they" are lying to us about basic physics so do you think they will accept those proofs?
  - eulenteufel 5y ago
jlokier 5y ago
> 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. It's not so much selling votes, as to discourage voter intimidation: The husband forces his wife, the boss forces his subordinates, the local mafia forces their victims to vote a particular way. I don't know the rules in the USA, but in the UK it is generally forbidden to stream yourself voting or take a photo in the polling station. Maintaining the secrecy of ballots is high priority. Someone might still privately take that picture of their ballot paper, after all there's a private voting booth; the officials wouldn't know. You're allowed to say you made a mistake and ask for a replacement ballot paper, so you could show your boss the version they want to see, and then vote differently.
- iso1210 5y ago
  > I don't know the rules in the USA, but in the UK it is generally forbidden to stream yourself voting or take a photo in the polling station. Maintaining the secrecy of ballots is high priority. Except we allow postal voting pretty much willy nilly, especailly in areas where intimidation can happen
  - jlokier 5y ago
    That's due to a trade-off of requirements, to maximise free and fair representation. Lack of postal votes makes the ballot less fair and representative, because it affects people with systematic bias in relevant sub-populations (wealth, working conditions, age, health, etc) and areas. In areas where intimidation can happen... for going to the polling station. (All the intimidator has to do is post menacing guards, soldiers, etc. outside the station or on the routes to it. There are plenty of news reports of this happening in some countries. I'm not aware of this in the UK though.) So the question is whether you get a more fair and representative vote outcome by allowing postal voting, or by disallowing it. The balance of trade-offs has led to UK policy allowing postal votes, encouraging each individual to fill out and seal their vote in private, and use statistical and other investigation methods to look for signs of fraud, while maintaining a high standard of secret ballots when voting in person. That might not be the balance that works best in other countries. In the UK it is said by the Electoral Commission that there is no evidence that postal voting has changed electoral outcomes to date, but some attempts at large scale fraud were discovered and prevented.
Spooky23 5y ago
The problem is that it solves a problem that nobody actually has and provides tinder to make a problem that actually exists worse. Political machines exploiting nursing homes, pushing absentee ballots on the elderly, etc are already problematic, and allowing field GOTV teams to collect this type of data in mass is would make expanding these operations in size and scope. You’d also create the new problem of hyper-partisan people crying about voter fraud. You’ll have a bunch of lunatics running around with fake ballot receipts to push whatever narrative they are trying to push. In my state, it’s illegal to take pictures of ballots at the poll, and there are bipartisan poll inspectors that will shut that down if it happens.

mariusor 5y ago

> That's a bug, not a feature. I think you're wrong. A bug would be if you could tell how a vote was cast, not if it was counted.

naniwaduni 5y ago
You also want to be able to check if your vote was falsely counted, lest an unscrupulous election operator simply reassign all but a handful of votes to its preferred option. Vote selling is a pretty nasty problem to work around.
- mariusor 5y ago
  I would normally agree with you, but no voting system today can provide you an answer to this question. The problem of unscrupulous operators can be circumvented if the votes are in a public ledger where the voter can backtrack their vote to the ledger "yes, its' my vote, nobody tempered with it", but the vote in the ledger can not be linked to the voter.
  - naniwaduni 5y ago
    To be clear, the property we want is, broadly speaking, "hard to tamper with (at scale) without getting caught". Ideally we would also catch tampering at small scale, but that's darn close to incompatible with denying vote buying. (A possible resolution is, of course, "well, what's wrong with vote buying between informed consenting adults?" But the unfortunate history shows that our electoral systems must compensate for underinformed coerced voters, and their regulations are written in blood.) Existing voting systems do have a countermeasure, if not a fantastic one: creating a trail of physical artifacts that can be manually audited to verify vote totals, and a roll of accepted votes to compare the count of said physical artifacts against. It's not fantastic because the error rates on those physical artifacts are stupendous, but tampering with votes at scale can then require (a) physical access, which humans are well-equipped to reason about, and (b) generating and destroying big piles of said physical artifact, which is expensive and expensive to hide. The gold standard of tampering with physical elections that we know of is basically denying observers the chance to audit, which is rightly considered suspicious. Tampering with electronic votes at scale does not have these cost properties. We can magnify costs without giving voters the ability to prove their votes to a third party (I am aware there are probabilistic constructions), but all such constructions (a) are much harder for the average voter to reason about than monitoring physical access (humans are quite optimized for monitoring physical access), yet (b) requires voters to actually audit their own votes and report non-inclusion en masse. You can see why this is a non-starter.