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Do you mean on HN or in real elections? In real elections, the situation is actually quite complicated depending on where you live. Specifically: - Many people
by ekr____ 4y ago
Do you mean on HN or in real elections? In real elections, the situation is actually quite complicated depending on where you live. Specifically:
- Many people vote on paper with hand counting, which is of course not digital.
- Many people vote on paper with machine counting, which is straightforwardly auditable.
- Many people vote on Direct Recording Electronic (touchscreen) machines. Some of these have paper trails which can be audited and some do not.
Some background here on conventional voting systems:
https://educatedguesswork.org/tags/voting/ https://educatedguesswork.org/tags/voting/
There has been quite a bit of work on cryptographic voting, but the blockchain feature doesn't really help that much, because the votes are signed and there is a public record of who voted and who did not. The complicated piece is ensuring the votes haven't been tampered with while keeping them secret, but again, the blockchain doesn't help here. The deployment problems around cryptographic voting are largely about endpoint security and user comprehension of what's happening.
- Kalanos 4y ago"vote on paper with hand counting" how is the sum communicated and stored?
- RandomLensman 4y agoBy phone and on paper, for example. Depending on which country you are in, these systems are very robust and difficult to tamper, as granular results are published and counting is decentralized. And here's the kicker: where I live, people can get pretty randomly drafted into counting and support duty for election day, i.e., not easy to insert enough malicious actors into those emptying the boxes, counting the ballots etc.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ekr____ 4y agoA variety of ways. However the counting itself is usually done in the open which means that people can observe that (1) the counting is done correctly and (2) is then transmitted and reported correctly.