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I'm pretty sure there are more than 20,000 polling workers in the USA, so no, it's not 99.9% who go home and trust. And most importantly, for every republican t

I'm pretty sure there are more than 20,000 polling workers in the USA, so no, it's not 99.9% who go home and trust. And most importantly, for every republican there is a democrat and vice versa, in every polling place, auditing the process in real time. And the reason you can fix this at the polling station level is simple: as long as the entire state is not captured by a single party (in which case no real elections are happening), the rest of the state can come in and fix the bad locations. Related to your points: 1. If there are more ballots than registered voters, this is easy to check. It's even better than a private key system, as extra registrations can also be caught on the day of polling, if people actually come in and vote again, whereas extra private keys being handed out will not see an election official again. 2. There is no way to actually "prove anonymously how you voted". To move the needle in any way, you have to come out personally and say "I know I voted like this, but the system shows me as voting like that, here is what it shows when I present my private key". And either way, this is actually a weakness of the system, as it allows trustworthy vote selling. 3. I don't understand how this is supposed to be any easier than in the current system. You still won't know how many people were legally allowed to be registered in that district, so what are you comparing against? 4. No, the threat surface is the entire electronic system. Someone can attack the system and prevent voters from getting private keys, issue corrupted keys, allow more keys than were registered, present the results differently from what is stored in the merkle tree, use side channels to decrypt private keys, exfiltrate data about individual voters, and who knows how many other ways. Plus, if you can vote from anywhere, you can be coerced, especially by family or caretakers, to vote in their presence, or disclose your private key so they can vote in your name themselves. And all this assumes the system is an actually secure Merkle tree. In reality, it would just be a computer program that takes your vote and shows you some data. What is actually running on the server is impossible for you to know unless you are given access to the hardware and software. 5. Sure, this is a clear advantage. You are severely underestimating the risks of an electronic system, and only looking at the purely theoretical logical core. All of the systems around it, through which you interact with the core system, and all of the human factors around using the systems, are a huge attack surface. For example, would you trust this system and issue your vote from a phone or PC which you know is infested with malware? If not, then you have to agree that every device is part of the attack surface of this system. Finally, in relation to your challenge, elections held by dictators are only meant to look like elections in more legitimate countries. So, if most countries hold paper elections (which is by far the majority), then the dictators will put on a show like that. If the majority of countries used electronic voting, dictators would also get electronic voting machines. Still, I don't know of any dictator that bothers to make a show of how free and correct are their elections.

EGreg 2y ago
Thank you for engaging point by point. Let’s look: 1) Easy to check by whom? With paper, it’s a bunch of people yelling to the news they saw discrepancies. In USA, we have probably the most expensive election in the world and we heard it all in 2020 from sour Republicans. To this day many people believe the election wasn’t secure and was “stolen”, including with physical ballots being shipped in, etc. On the one hand you have people yelling and on the other side you have people saying it’s all fine. Just like after a Venezuela or Belorussia election or the Crimea referendum. None of that would be the case if the elections could just have a standard way to be run, same as we now have electronic standards for DNSSEC or certificate PKI the EVM or IEEE standards. We can do things at scale because of standards. We could remove most of the uncertainty. 2) You don’t have to come out and reveal your PII, in order to publish a complaint as a voter. You’d just have to reveal that you know the private key, here is your receipt signed by the vendors in the system, and here is the actual result the UX vendors reported. The reputation of the vendor would be PROVABLY destroyed, all those receipts would be entered as evidence and they’d have to pay reparations in lawsuits. All because people were forced to double-check from 2 devices. The UX vendor would face chilling effects far larger than currently, for tampering with an election. None of this requires PII of the claimants. 3 and 4. You say it’s the whole system but proceed to list only things related to registration. Which, I already said, remains an issue, but the actual voting can be done on a phone. All your concerns could be also done with a banking app etc. where far more money is at stake than a single vote, yet people use them all the time. I am not sure how you are supposed to impersonate a person unless you steal their phone, and then force them to open the voting app and enter their biometrics, just for a lousy vote — and you’d have to do this all across town at scale? Nan. If you’re saying that a bank can “roll back a transaction” if you report losing your app, and somehow the election reaching finality (like a blockchain transaction) is a negative, then you’re saying that As for people losing their private keys or phones or maybe so poor they can’t afford to have a computer or whatever, they can register to vote in person. If they failed to update their registration, though, before the election, and they can’t vote from their phone, it’s the same issue as if they didnt register at all. So they didn’t vote. But on net there is a much bigger turnout. 5. Okay we agree here. And this isnt an academic point — Al Gore would have been president if they could have counted the votes faster, we could have probably avoided the entire Middle East being on fire, the rollback of US civil liberties, maybe even prevented 9/11 with NORAD, and finally could have avoided the current disastrous wars in Ukraine etc. since Bush was the one to push them into NATO back in 2008 when the Ukrainian public strongly opposed NATO membership until 2014, but he worked with Yuschenko to do it anyway (https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2010/03/29/ukraine-says-no-to-nato/ https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2010/03/29/ukraine-says-n... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_Ukraine) I think we both know that a corrupt government would not want to secure elections with merkle trees and publish them online. Too much chance of being caught, and they’d have no way to fudge the results reliably. By making decision-making cheap, the public in every country would be welcomed to hold regular referendums on topics (like California Proposition XYZ) and the governments would be MORE accountable to the people. (Personally, I think provably random polling is superior to voting, due to turnout issues, but that’s another story). You can say whatever you like but when the rubber meets the road, corrupt officials and their detractors overseas (the war hawks looking to cast doubt on any way to figure out what, say, the actual people of Crimea or Donetsk want) both prefer paper ballots and the effective inability to cast absentee ballots when you fled the country or were internally displaced. While cryptocurrency allows you to take your money with you while fleeing a war zone, the crypto-voting would let you vote from anywhere as long as you had registered as a citizen back before being displaced etc. It’s literally technology you can add to secure things and corrupt governments avoid it, war hawks across the world hipe they don’t use it, and you are arguing that even adding it makes things less secure and less reliable.

EGreg 2y ago

Thank you for engaging point by point. Let’s look: 1) Easy to check by whom? With paper, it’s a bunch of people yelling to the news they saw discrepancies. In USA, we have probably the most expensive election in the world and we heard it all in 2020 from sour Republicans. To this day many people believe the election wasn’t secure and was “stolen”, including with physical ballots being shipped in, etc. On the one hand you have people yelling and on the other side you have people saying it’s all fine. Just like after a Venezuela or Belorussia election or the Crimea referendum. None of that would be the case if the elections could just have a standard way to be run, same as we now have electronic standards for DNSSEC or certificate PKI the EVM or IEEE standards. We can do things at scale because of standards. We could remove most of the uncertainty. 2) You don’t have to come out and reveal your PII, in order to publish a complaint as a voter. You’d just have to reveal that you know the private key, here is your receipt signed by the vendors in the system, and here is the actual result the UX vendors reported. The reputation of the vendor would be PROVABLY destroyed, all those receipts would be entered as evidence and they’d have to pay reparations in lawsuits. All because people were forced to double-check from 2 devices. The UX vendor would face chilling effects far larger than currently, for tampering with an election. None of this requires PII of the claimants. 3 and 4. You say it’s the whole system but proceed to list only things related to registration. Which, I already said, remains an issue, but the actual voting can be done on a phone. All your concerns could be also done with a banking app etc. where far more money is at stake than a single vote, yet people use them all the time. I am not sure how you are supposed to impersonate a person unless you steal their phone, and then force them to open the voting app and enter their biometrics, just for a lousy vote — and you’d have to do this all across town at scale? Nan. If you’re saying that a bank can “roll back a transaction” if you report losing your app, and somehow the election reaching finality (like a blockchain transaction) is a negative, then you’re saying that As for people losing their private keys or phones or maybe so poor they can’t afford to have a computer or whatever, they can register to vote in person. If they failed to update their registration, though, before the election, and they can’t vote from their phone, it’s the same issue as if they didnt register at all. So they didn’t vote. But on net there is a much bigger turnout. 5. Okay we agree here. And this isnt an academic point — Al Gore would have been president if they could have counted the votes faster, we could have probably avoided the entire Middle East being on fire, the rollback of US civil liberties, maybe even prevented 9/11 with NORAD, and finally could have avoided the current disastrous wars in Ukraine etc. since Bush was the one to push them into NATO back in 2008 when the Ukrainian public strongly opposed NATO membership until 2014, but he worked with Yuschenko to do it anyway (https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2010/03/29/ukraine-says-no-to-nato/ https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2010/03/29/ukraine-says-n... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_Ukraine) I think we both know that a corrupt government would not want to secure elections with merkle trees and publish them online. Too much chance of being caught, and they’d have no way to fudge the results reliably. By making decision-making cheap, the public in every country would be welcomed to hold regular referendums on topics (like California Proposition XYZ) and the governments would be MORE accountable to the people. (Personally, I think provably random polling is superior to voting, due to turnout issues, but that’s another story). You can say whatever you like but when the rubber meets the road, corrupt officials and their detractors overseas (the war hawks looking to cast doubt on any way to figure out what, say, the actual people of Crimea or Donetsk want) both prefer paper ballots and the effective inability to cast absentee ballots when you fled the country or were internally displaced. While cryptocurrency allows you to take your money with you while fleeing a war zone, the crypto-voting would let you vote from anywhere as long as you had registered as a citizen back before being displaced etc. It’s literally technology you can add to secure things and corrupt governments avoid it, war hawks across the world hipe they don’t use it, and you are arguing that even adding it makes things less secure and less reliable.