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I find it extremely concerning that they mix e-government and electronic voting. The former is obviously a good idea, while the latter is an existential threat

by fsh 4y ago

I find it extremely concerning that they mix e-government and electronic voting. The former is obviously a good idea, while the latter is an existential threat to democracy. Estonian citizens can now no longer audit the validity of their elections in the way that paper ballots have allowed.

SuoDuanDao 4y ago
To the Cryptoskeptics of HN, does this seem like a legitimate use case of Blockchain to you?
- francislavoie 4y ago
  No. https://www.usvotefoundation.org/blockchain-voting-is-not-a-security-strategy https://www.usvotefoundation.org/blockchain-voting-is-not-a-...
- rpigab 4y ago
  It's a typical case of a problem that we really think could be fixed by technology, but you're only adding or changing technology layers and the end result doesn't change, because it's not a technological problem, but a human one. People can be confident in paper votes because they can understand how to audit the result, and who does it. The best e-voting software in the world can provide that level of trust only to some engineers who know the code, and only if they can audit all the systems where the software is deployed. It's like passwords, it can't work if part of the population has no clue why it's needed or how it works. It's even worse with blockchain, because you can't put everything on the blockchain, it needs to interact with the real world, and that's where you can cheat the system (like stealing the keys of people in retirement homes because they don't know what they are for - sure it happens with paper but it's harder to do and easier to catch them in the act).
andsoitis 4y ago
Correctness of system, especially w.r.t. things like voting, commerce, etc., are important to get right and to be able to verify. Wikipedia has a whole article about it in the Estonian case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia
rocket_surgeron 4y ago
North Korea and Russia use paper ballots exclusively, and the recent referendum in Ukraine was conducted using paper ballots. Stuffing ballot boxes is much easier than an attack on an electronic voting system.
- fsh 4y ago
  Attacking an electronic voting system requires changing a few integers. Surely this is much easier than stuffing ballot boxes all over the country. In functioning democracies, the polls have observers from multiple parties which makes ballot stuffing infeasible.
- qwytw 4y ago
  > Stuffing ballot boxes is much easier than an attack on an electronic voting system. If you have free and independent observers it most definitely is not. If you don't have them it doesn't matter (with an electronic system you would have had exactly the same results both in Ukraine and Korea just at a much lower cost..). You'd need much resources and political power to compromise a normal election. With internet voting you'd need just a few people in the right spot (i.e. developing/maintaining the system) and some security vulnerability/backdoor to do it. Also it's virtually impossible to guarantee both security and anonymity with internet voting.
manv1 4y ago
Election integrity is more about the people running the election, not the method in which the votes are tallied. That's both a strength and weakness of the system. The less people in the process, the easier it is for someone to manipulate the process. That's irrespective of limiting the choices, obviously.
- qwytw 4y ago
  In all/most democratic countries anyone can observe the counting of paper ballots and the process itself is relatively simple and easy to understand for almost anyone (even if not very efficiency). With internet voting we lose that. There is no way for most people to audit the system. Even if it's supposedly open source and transparent it's tricky to guarantee that the actual system is not tampered with and has no backdoors. > Election integrity is more about the people running the election True. But but fraud involving paper ballots is both difficult to execute at a large scale and hard to hide from other which is a huge deterrence.
Strom 4y ago
Estonia already has experience with faked election results with paper voting, due to Russian occupation. So that argument doesn't work as well in Estonia. Yes the electronic system can have flaws, but the old system didn't prevent the issues either. So might as well go with convenience.

by fsh 4y ago

SuoDuanDao 4y ago

To the Cryptoskeptics of HN, does this seem like a legitimate use case of Blockchain to you?

francislavoie 4y ago
No. https://www.usvotefoundation.org/blockchain-voting-is-not-a-security-strategy https://www.usvotefoundation.org/blockchain-voting-is-not-a-...
rpigab 4y ago
It's a typical case of a problem that we really think could be fixed by technology, but you're only adding or changing technology layers and the end result doesn't change, because it's not a technological problem, but a human one. People can be confident in paper votes because they can understand how to audit the result, and who does it. The best e-voting software in the world can provide that level of trust only to some engineers who know the code, and only if they can audit all the systems where the software is deployed. It's like passwords, it can't work if part of the population has no clue why it's needed or how it works. It's even worse with blockchain, because you can't put everything on the blockchain, it needs to interact with the real world, and that's where you can cheat the system (like stealing the keys of people in retirement homes because they don't know what they are for - sure it happens with paper but it's harder to do and easier to catch them in the act).

andsoitis 4y ago

Correctness of system, especially w.r.t. things like voting, commerce, etc., are important to get right and to be able to verify. Wikipedia has a whole article about it in the Estonian case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_Estonia

rocket_surgeron 4y ago

North Korea and Russia use paper ballots exclusively, and the recent referendum in Ukraine was conducted using paper ballots. Stuffing ballot boxes is much easier than an attack on an electronic voting system.

fsh 4y ago
Attacking an electronic voting system requires changing a few integers. Surely this is much easier than stuffing ballot boxes all over the country. In functioning democracies, the polls have observers from multiple parties which makes ballot stuffing infeasible.
qwytw 4y ago
> Stuffing ballot boxes is much easier than an attack on an electronic voting system. If you have free and independent observers it most definitely is not. If you don't have them it doesn't matter (with an electronic system you would have had exactly the same results both in Ukraine and Korea just at a much lower cost..). You'd need much resources and political power to compromise a normal election. With internet voting you'd need just a few people in the right spot (i.e. developing/maintaining the system) and some security vulnerability/backdoor to do it. Also it's virtually impossible to guarantee both security and anonymity with internet voting.

manv1 4y ago

Election integrity is more about the people running the election, not the method in which the votes are tallied. That's both a strength and weakness of the system. The less people in the process, the easier it is for someone to manipulate the process. That's irrespective of limiting the choices, obviously.

qwytw 4y ago
In all/most democratic countries anyone can observe the counting of paper ballots and the process itself is relatively simple and easy to understand for almost anyone (even if not very efficiency). With internet voting we lose that. There is no way for most people to audit the system. Even if it's supposedly open source and transparent it's tricky to guarantee that the actual system is not tampered with and has no backdoors. > Election integrity is more about the people running the election True. But but fraud involving paper ballots is both difficult to execute at a large scale and hard to hide from other which is a huge deterrence.

Strom 4y ago

Estonia already has experience with faked election results with paper voting, due to Russian occupation. So that argument doesn't work as well in Estonia. Yes the electronic system can have flaws, but the old system didn't prevent the issues either. So might as well go with convenience.