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I have a very practical question with big political implications: Can electronic passports be used to make large-scale elections without government involvement?

• morshu9001 11mo ago
  The authoritarian govt controls who gets passports and can create fake people if it wants.
  • embedding-shape 11mo ago
    I think once an authoritarian government is holding elections, regardless digital, analog or anything else, they can manipulate the results, there is no 100% foolproof way of holding honest elections when the top authority might not be honest.
    • morshu9001 11mo ago
      See also: e2ee on Facebook Messenger
• iso1631 11mo ago
  > authoritarian countries that issue modern e-passports but do not allow free elections Those tend to not issue passports (of any kind) to many citizens. Then there's access. In America for example only half the adults in the country even have a passport, and I suspect that skews quite heavily towards one demographic. Do you think that India, Nigeria, or Russia have more equitable access? And even if they did, what stops the state issuing extra fake passports to citizens they want to vote. of course then there's key elements of a free election, freedom of access to the ballot paper, freedom to campaign the same as others, freedom from imprisonment because you are running against the incumbent leader, having each vote being worth the same. Many countries prevent people in jail from voting, or even people who used to be in jail. Many countries give more power to one constituency than another, almost all have some level of unequal access to campaigning. It's not a "Free election" or "no election". The actual casting of the vote is only part of the story.
• alphazard 11mo ago
  Yes, as long as the passports implement a signing scheme, and the set of valid public keys (the electorate) can be agreed upon. If you can sign arbitrary data, then you can sign other public keys, including whatever the voting system requires. Vitalik has a great blog post about blockchain voting. https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/05/25/voting2.html https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/05/25/voting2.html You probably wouldn't want to use the cryptography on the passports themselves to implement the voting system. You probably want to use one of the general purpose zkSTARKs or multi-party-computation systems.
  • morshu9001 11mo ago
    Can it be anonymous though? Ie you as a citizen can check that the outcome didn't count illegitimate votes, and that it included your vote, but can't tell who voted each way or at all.
    • gruez 11mo ago
      hence why >You probably wouldn't want to use the cryptography on the passports themselves to implement the voting system. You probably want to use one of the general purpose zkSTARKs or multi-party-computation systems.
      • morshu9001 11mo ago
        Even if you're using a separate key for voting, the passport key had to sign it. How do you prove legitimacy of the voting key without exposing the passport key? It's not like in blockchain where your anonymity normally comes from people just not knowing which irl person owns a pubkey. (Though I know Monero etc use homomorphic enc for anon payments) I'm also assuming here that the govt is signing all the passport keys, cause idk how else that would work.
    • alphazard 11mo ago
      Yes, it is possible to anonymously aggregate votes from a set of public keys, and ensure that no key has voted twice. It's also possible to ensure that one's own vote was included in the total. The fact that this is even possible is deeply un-intuitive as it requires some of the most sophisticated cryptography. That's probably the greatest barrier to adoption. When people think of electronic voting, they think about trusting a company to make machines that operate on plaintext, and require humans to guard access to the machines. They aren't thinking about systems that are provably correct, where it is more likely for an asteroid to wipe out the country conducting the election than for the election results to be incorrect. For the details and tradeoffs, I highly recommend Vitalik's blog.
• j16sdiz 11mo ago
  > authoritarian countries that issue modern e-passports but do not allow free elections You are trying to solve a political problem with a technological solution. 1. Many authoritarian countries don't allow freedom of travel (i.e. it is not easy to get a passport) 2. If they don't care free election, what's stopping them issuing more passport just for voting? 3. What's stopping them confiscating or revoking your passport?
• Muromec 11mo ago
  >Can activists organize an election for all citizens of that country in some online form, asking the voters to scan their passports using their phones, so that By the point said activists reach organizational capacity to do so, they have already won and can hold the vote basically with scanning a qr code with a simple app. >only legitimate citizens (who have passports) can vote this makes no sense as a requirement in a situation you described.